INTERNAL BEAUTY OF SANSKRIT-PART II

Internal Beauty of Sanskrit (Part II)

"Abhi-nrutya of Sound and Sense"

by

Narayan R. Joshi Ph.D.
(All rights reserved by the author)

Also see:  http://sookta-sumana.blogspot.com/2011/02/internal-beauty-of-sanskrit-part-i-new.html

Introduction


There are three puzzles in the ancient history of India. The first is the Indus script and seals. The second is the time of Mahaabhaarata war. The third is the origin of Sanskrit language. There are many theories about the origin of human languages. This is also true in case of Sanskrit. Many theories are proposed about the origin of Sanskrit by eastern and western scholars. One finds interesting information about early development of Sanskrit from Vedas, Braahmanas, Nirukta and from other ancient literature. Western linguists in the past two hundred years discovered the language families among languages of the world. The discovery of Indo-European language family generated new interest in Sanskrit, the important member of the family. The discovery destroyed the myth of Tower of Babel and threw the western world to revise their linguistic theories dominated by Bible for almost two thousand years. The discovery posed many challenges to the traditional beliefs of Hindus such as divinity of Sanskrit and Vedas.

Changes in Sanskrit

Language is not static. It is dynamic. It keeps changing. There are many reasons for linguistic changes. One obvious reason is the Principle of Least Efforts. People are lazy to pronounce words as they are. They change sounds in words to make it easy to say. The most common example from the north Indian dialect is changing Indra into Indar and Chandra into Chandar. Such changes (Apabhramsha) might have occurred in Sanskrit words although great efforts were made in ancient India to preserve all features of Sanskrit intact as much as possible. Sanskrit produced many Apabhramsha languages. At the same time Sanskrit maintained her integrity due to her prescriptive grammar of Paanini. Did Sanskrit undergo changes from 3000 BC to 500 BC before she reached hands of Paanini? Taking into consideration dynamic nature of languages, it would be very difficult to deny changes. Epic Mahaabhaarata tells us that languages other than Sanskrit were in vogue during its era. The discussion stresses the point that languages are prone to systematic changes. I have no knowledge of changes that occurred in Sanskrit from 3000 BC to 500 BC. It is certain that during the period 500 BC to 1AD there was much activity in Sanskrit linguistics in India. Scholars were complaining that certain expressions from Vedas make no sense to them. It is said that there is 5 percent difference between Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit.

Saadhu and Asaadhu Words


According to Meemaamsaa and Vaishes’ika schools Sanskrit language is the only standard (Saadhu) language and its use alone can engender merit. They also say that meaningfulness is coextensive with saadhutva. The words in Vedas have no beginning, yet they are meaningful. Other words used in folk languages have a beginning of meaning by way of convention (Sanketa), and thus their meaning is not eternal. Hence they (Asaadhu) cannot be the sources of our duty. All words, to whatever language they belong, are meaningful. But all of them are not saadhu, i.e. they cannot give merit to the user. Meaningfulness cannot be confused with saadhutva. A word may be asaadhu yet meaningful. Paanini was concerned more with the form of language of his time rather than with its meaning. Grammarian Patanjali in unambiguous terms says that the purpose of writing grammar (Shabdaanushaasana) is to give a standard language (saadhu shabda) the use of which facilitates communication and assures merit to the speaker hereafter. Different languages may have their own grammars. So it was added that a particular use of language confers merit. In this way dialogue revolves around special status of Sanskrit and Sanskrit words although grammar presents a more logical and liberal view than that proposed by Meemaamsaa school.

Meaning of Saadhu and Asaadhu words

Meanings associated with asaadhu words rise out of human convention. Language using asaadhu words is thus a conventional language. Ancient Indians were debating about the special status of Sanskrit. Is it a conventional language like any other language or is it a special one because it was the language of Vaidika revelation? Let us assume that it is the special language with stock of saadhu words. In ancient India the debate did not end here. There were various opinions about meanings of saadhu words of Sanskrit. As regards the meaning of a word, all schools of Indian philosophy have their own views revolving around Sphotavaada and Varnavaada.

Dhvani and Sphota Aspects of Words

In a room father, mother and a younger child are reading the same story book loudly turn by turn. The older brother is studying in the neighboring room. When he listens to voices in his room coming from the adjacent room, he recognizes the voice of father, mother and his younger brother. Variations in voice tambre of father, mother and the child produce three different dhvanis. In short in pronunciation of the same word by three different people, Dhvani was different but Sphota was the same. The problem of meaning of Sanskrit words is very much discussed by different Indian schools of linguistic philosophy.

One Word and One Meaning

When we subtract voice variations from the uttered word we get Sphota. When we eliminate poetic shades of a word, we then concentrate on denotative meaning (Abhidhaa) of the word. In this way Abhidhaa meaning of the word and Sphota of the pronounced word become subject of further discussion. Now the discussion revolves around the origin of Abhidhaa meaning of a Sanskrit word. According to one school of Jainas, one word expresses one meaning only. A word which appears to convey more meanings than one is to be treated, not as one word, but as many words as the number of meanings it appears to convey. In the discussion of the relation between word and meaning, Jain linguistic philosophy favors the view that every distinctive meaning needs a distinctive word. As a matter of fact, this is exactly what we do when we write glossary at the end of the scientific manual. We create Paribhaas’aa (technical terminology) in order to reduce ambiguity from the meaning of technical words used to describe the technical subject. This discussion leads us to the new concept, viz., could all words in Sanskrit be treated as words of Paribhaas’aa? We are choosing Sanskrit here because debate was revolving around Sanskrit semantics in ancient India in which all schools Vaidika, Jain and Bauddha participated with enthusiasm. They produced wealth of linguistic philosophy.

Philosophy becomes a linguistic problem

Generally speaking recent Indian philosophical discussions revolve around either Vedaanta or Upanisads. The wealth of information from Jain and Bauddha sources is rarely acknowledged. In some cases philosophical discussions show shades of sectarian biases. Even within the domain of Sanskrit linguistics, hardly any attention is given to the technical Sanskrit words used in the ancient treatises on Astronomy, Metallurgy, Mathematics and Physical sciences. Nobody discusses sources of the ancient Sanskrit terminology in the light of discussions on Sanskrit semantics continued through the long chain of ancient scholars to the modern day scholars. Religious verses are repeatedly used by people centuries after centuries. Hence they are prone to changes in pronunciation, changes due to development of new dialects and translations. Different sects interpret religious words with different meanings. That makes philosophy a linguistic problem. Ancient Sanskrit technical manuals were used by a small number of scholars interested in the subject. Any scientist playing with ancient technical terminology and changing it purposefully is of very remote possibility. So the stock of ancient Sanskrit technical words is the treasure that needs to be explored for validity of Varnavaada proposed by a certain group of scholars from ancient India.

What is Varnavaada?

Right from the time of Patanjali to this day, discussions on Sanskrit semantics are revolving around the origin of Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the most ancient scriptures, Vedas of India. Is the meaning of a Sanskrit word decided by Loka Sanketa (convention of the community) or is it decided by God or is it decided by the nature (Svabhaava)? If it is decided by Loka Sanketa, then Sanskrit is like any other conventional language and no further elaboration is needed. One can say that saving Vedas sound by sound was simply the act of religious faith. If Vedic Sanskrit is inspired by God in revelations to ancient sages, then new questions arise. Did Vedic sages know Sanskrit before revelations? However the possibility of meaning of Sanskrit words connected to the peculiar nature of Sanskrit opens new chapter of investigation. Sanskrit is highly inflected language. The letters of alphabet of Sanskrit are arranged scientifically according to their origin in human vocal tract. The table of alphabet contains 36 consonants and 16 vowels. According to Varnavaada, each letter (phoneme or Varna) of Sanskrit alphabet carries fixed basic semantic unit. The Abhidhaa meaning of the Sphota of Sanskrit word arises by adding elemental meanings of phonemes making that word. This kind of arrangement is called Phonemic Symbolism. The phonemic symbolism is denied by modern linguists for conventional languages like English, Arabic etc. Although the ancient Indian books talk about Phonemic Symbolism (Varnvaada), they do not offer consistent presentation of semantic units of Sanskrit phonemes. The author of the present paper took different approach. His attention was drawn to the physical properties of sounds of phonemes. His hypothesis was that if the wide scale phonemic symbolism existed in Sanskrit, then it cannot be a random arrangement. It has to rest on some intrinsic scheme and the scheme has to be tied with physical properties of phonemic sounds. He made efforts in that direction and it worked. In short Sanskrit words tell their own stories. This scheme leads to fixed meanings of Sanskrit prefix which could help in coining new consistent technical terminology. Let us see some examples of phonemic symbolism discovered by the present author.


Fixed meaning for the prefix “Abhi”

The dictionary meanings of the prefix ‘Abhi’ are many. They are as follow: towards, for, against, over, above, upon, across, etc. However, according to the phonemic symbolism proposed in this paper, the prefix Abhi means the ‘process of making a replica’ of something like a rubber stamp. Now the replica is a copy of the original or it is like the original or as if it is original. The fixed meaning of the prefix ‘Abhi’ is therefore taken as ‘as if’ in this work. Let us see examples. Examples are taken from the dictionary of V.S. Apte.

(1) Abhi-naya: Acting, any theatrical act.
The root in the parent word, -naya is ‘Nee‘. Its meaning is to carry, to lead, to guide, to direct. Now in the act of ‘Acting in a drama’, the actor is not carrying anything or anybody physically but he carries with him or directs emotions of audience. This is equivalent to saying, ’as if he is carrying or guiding or leading’. Here one act is replaced by the other similar act.
(2) Abhi-roopa: Corresponding with, conformable or suitable to.
The parent word is ‘roopa’. Its meaning is form, figure, and appearance. When school children mimic the court of law on the stage of their school, (as in a mock trial), it is called Abhiroopa Nyaayaalaya (the mock court). It is not a real court but it looks like a court, or ‘as if it is a court’. It is like a copy of the real court.
(3) Abhi-ruci: Desire, taste, liking, relish, delight, pleasure.
The meaning of the parent word ‘ruci’ is taste. It is the physical act of tasting something, say, a candy bar. But the word Abhiruci means liking. When one likes good literature, one is said to have uccha (high) Abhiruci or high level taste. Here again the prefix has the same meaning ‘as if he is tasting’!
(4) Abhi-jaata: Original
The parent word ‘jaata’ means born. It indicates physical birth. Original poetry or literature is also born but it is not a physical birth from the womb of a mother but from the brain of a poet. However it is like a birth or ‘as if born’. It is therefore called Abhijaata Saahitya (Original literature).
(5) Abhidhaa: The literal sense of a word, denotation.
The parent word ‘dhaa’ means to hold, to set, to contain. The word Abhidhaa means the denotative meaning of a word. It is the meaning held to the word even in circumstances where the word may suggest different meaning. This holding is not physical but it is ‘as if holding’. The Abhidhaa meaning of Sanskrit words is the topic of discussion in this research work.
(6) Abhi-jnyaana: Recognition, Remembrance.
The parent word ‘jnyaana’ means cognition. The name of one of the dramas of the celebrated Indian poet Kalidasa is Abhijnyaana Shaakuntalam. The king Dushyanta forgot his bride Shakuntalaa because she lost the wedding ring given by him to her. The fisherman, who found the ring, recognized the royal insignia on the ring and took it back to the king. At that moment the king remembered giving the ring to Shakuntalaa. The recognition came back to the king because of the copy of the cognition stored in his brain. For this reason Kavi Kaalidaasa chose the appropriate name to the drama. It is said that when GOD realization comes to a devotee, he recognizes ‘abhijaanaati’ GOD. This is so because he knew GOD originally. He forgot GOD due to delusion. When the curtain of the delusion (or illusion) is lifted, he recognizes GOD which process is called Abhijnyaanam, the replica of the original ‘jnyaanam’.
(7) Abhi-udaya: Prosperity
The parent word ‘udaya’ means physical rise like the Sunrise. However, the word Abhi-udaya or the sandhi word Abhyudaya does not mean a physical rise but ‘as if rise’. This is advancement in life or prosperity.
(8) Abhi-nava: painted, refurbished, polished, recast.
The parent word ‘nava’ means new but Abhinava means ‘as if it were new’. This could be because of polishing the item or painting it or redoing it or reworking it makes it like new.
(9) Abhi-sarana: Circulation
This word was used in connection with the circulation of blood. The parent word ‘sarana’ means to move. The blood in a body moves but it does not go away. It returns or circulates. It appears ‘as if it is moving away’ which is ‘Abhisarana’.
(10) Abhi-yukta: Engaged, or occupied or absorbed in.
The parent word ‘yukta’ means joined, united, fastened, yoked. When one is absorbed in say in his study, he is not physically attached to the study. So he is ‘as if yukta’ or Abhi-yukta. Now if somebody engaged in the criminal act. Then also he is Abhi-yukta.
These ten examples illustrate that the prefix ‘Abhi’ has the fixed meaning ‘as if’ consistent with its new single meaning discovered first time in this work.

Fixed meaning of the consonant ‘/gh/’

This sound is voiced and aspirated. This velar (guttural) sound is loaded with features more than those of the earlier three velar sounds of /k/, /kh/ and /g/. Here, the meaning of /k/ is ‘to resolve’. The meaning of /kh/ is ‘increased resolution’. The meaning of /g/ is ‘greater resolution leaning to almost independence’. After /g/ change takes place in the meaning of ‘gh’. The semantic category chosen for /gh/ is of ‘decreased resolution leaning to trapping’. Let us see examples.

(1) Ghars’ana
It means friction. In friction between two surfaces, the microscopic hills and valleys get locked into each other resisting the relative motion. Thus in friction there is slight trapping and then release.
(2) Gharma-bindu
It means sweat, perspiration drop oozing out of the skin pore. It does not flow because of partial trapping.
(3) Ghos’a
The word Ghos’a means noise, tumult, cry or noise. It also refers to thundering of clouds. Noise in voice or sound is due to fricatives and hence the word has the sound of /gh/ in it.
(4) Ghatikaa Paatra
The Ghatika Patra is the copper pot with hole at the bottom used to trap water in the ancient Indian water clock.
(5) Ghoorna Vaayu
It means whirl wind where wind is partially trapped and also free to turn around.
Let us see examples where the phoneme /gh/ occupies the position other than the first in a word.
(6) Megha
It means a cloud. It is trapped water vapor.
(7) Deergha
It means long in time or space. It is said Deerghasootri Vinashyati. It means procrastination spoils the job due to complications or trapping.
These examples are enough to prove the point that the chosen fixed meaning for the phoneme /gh/ makes sense.

It is not possible to offer fixed semantic categories discovered for all Varnas of Sanskrit. They show that there is internal mechanism in Sanskrit to preserve meanings of her shabdas. This is internal beauty of Sanskrit where sound and sense go hand in hand.(Editor's comment: It is indeed the abhi-nrutya of sound and sense.)

N. R. Joshi.

(Editor's Note: www.sookta-sumana.blogspot.com is extremely privileged to have an opportunity to publish this unique discovery by Dr. N. R. Joshi. His book on this
topic will be published soon giving elaborate details which will make it possible to
coin new words in Sanskrit that have defined connotations and meanings that would be easy to decipher even for those with preliminary knowledge of this system who are reading or hearing the word for the first time. Editor has illustrated this by coining a word "abhi-nrutya" of sound and sense.)

AMARTYA SEN'S NAIVETE IN TILLING THE GROUND HE STANDS ON

Amartya Sen’s Failed Attempt

23/04/2011 12:07:24

by

Dr. Vijaya Rajiva

(Courtesy: Haindava Keralam)

After winning the Nobel Prize for Economics (1998) Amartya Sen took a fateful turn at freelance writing about Indian history, politics, religion, culture and what not. In 2005 he produced a book ‘The Argumentative Indian’ which sought to contain Hindu India by a well known technique, that of appropriating the merits of Hindu civilisation and adopting them as part of his new effort at a renaissance , while at the same time rejecting the ongoing strengths of that civilization which has provided the foundations for his contemporary project. His dual method seeks to appropriate the open ended vision and enquiry that has been characteristic of Hindu civilization since its earliest beginnings, while rejecting Hindu Dharma, which is the source of that very open endedness.

His attempt has failed because it is not an authentic one. Why he embarked on this project is a question mark. His future career may provide some answers.

Meanwhile, it is important for Hindus to recognize the aims of this project and its modus operandi. Unlike Arundhati Roy’s vindictive comments about her mythical evil Brahmanic Hindu state, Amartya Sen moves carefully and cautiously to build his case against Hindu India. The style is chatty and leisurely. Hindu civilization Sen intones has a long standing tradition of argument and debate, ever since the time of the open ended Vedas. It should be revived. It should not be abandoned in the face of Hindu nationalism which he alleges has rejected this open ended tradition and has “incarcerated Hinduism.”

The question ,ofcourse, is who is doing the incarceration, and indeed who is trying to deal a death blow to Hinduism ?

Sen cannot sound , does not sound, like Arundhati Roy. He cannot make blanket generalizations against Hinduism ( as she does) since that would take the bottom out of his project which stakes its claims of authenticity on an open ended Hinduism which he feels must be revived. Gradually, after the first salvo against the Hindu nationalists it becomes clear that he has an agenda. In a charming biographical essay in the book he speaks about his early atheism and materialism. Presumably, that still obtains.


What are the characteristics of his method in this book ?

1.Omissions : while speaking about the Ramayana he does not mention that Valmiki saw Lord Rama as a divine figure. Needless to say he does not even mention the other famous Ramayanas, Tulasidas’s Ramacharitamanas, the Kamban Ramayana and Ezuthatchan’s Ramayana.,all of which extol Rama as a divine figure. The songs and music , both of the north and the south view Rama as a divine figure. The Rama temples house a deity. Hanuman the quintessential devotee worships him as divine. Festivals, dance dramas, the classical music of India all focus on Rama as a divine figure.

Why does Sen omit all this ? He has to maintain the secular character of the Rama
figure because he needs to eliminate the central role of Rama bhakti in contemporary Hindu life and thought, especially among the masses. It is, therefore, a combination of lack of knowledge of the topic, snobbery (the aam admi’s religious sensibilities do not count in HIS view of a secular India) and a deliberate omission with an agenda in mind.

The second striking omission is the absence of the word Dharma in his rather superficial account of the dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna. He will repeat this argument in his later work The Idea of Justice (2009). Arjuna questions the wisdom of the war where there will be a great deal of bloodshed and devastation. Krishna advises him that since he is a warrior his DUTY is to defend his people against the wicked.

Sen uses the word ‘duty’ but not Dharma, which has huge moral and ethical implications in Hinduism and goes beyond the word ‘duty.’ He strenuously avoids that central word of Hinduism.

2.The inaacurate rendering of Indian history. Buddhism, according to him, dominated India for a thousand years. This is not quite accurate. Some three hundred years after the Buddha’s death Buddhism migrated to other countries such Tibet , China, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Sri Lanka and the far East. Its influence waned as early as the first years of the first millennium (CE )and lingered on till the rise of Sankara and his Vedanta in the 8tt to 9th century of the Christian era.

3.And certainly while Ashoka (3rd century B.C.) and Akbar (16th century of the Christian era) were great kings there were many other great kings in Hindu India.

It is embarrassing to have to repeat the long line of great Hindu kings that he has ignored, both in the north and in the south. With regard to the south the silence is deafening. Nothing about the great kings of Vijayanagar (Hindu kings) ,nothing about the Cholas, the Cheras and the Pandyas etc.

Indeed, anything south of the Vindhyas is omitted in his accounts. There are some brief references to Ujjain, to Kalidasa and so on with regard to the north. It soon becomes clear that Dr. Sen is not in his element.

4.The frequent references to the ‘greatness’ of the selective figures of his choice. For instance while talking about devotional Hinduism in the middles ages, he omits Tulsidas and hails Kabir as the greatest poet of the times ! No doubt Kabir was a great figure, but the greatest !

Medieval India was bustling with great poets, savants and sages.

The present writer is of the opinion that Dr. Sen is ill prepared to write about Hindu culture, philosophy and literature. He would be more credible if he stayed with economic issues, with development, with the issues of poverty and class injustices etc. This indeed is where he could make a difference.

By his own reasoning, the ‘argumentative Indian’, the one who is open and tolerant of diverse traditions, has been the Hindu norm. Amartya Sen’s advocacy of it is neither here nor there. It is nothing new. What is new about his project is his attempt to separate out this ethos from Hindu India and present it as something brand new under his aegis and his sponsorship of it. In other words, by his rather exaggerated notion of his own project if Amartya Sen had not appeared on the Indian scene this ‘argumentative ‘ tradition is alas bound to disappear !

As matters stand, his individual agenda is misplaced . Hindu India carries on. People still go to their temples, throng at festivals, pray at Kumbh Melas, watch in awe at the celebration of ancient rituals and celebrate Hindu festivals. Hindu syncretism is alive and well. The life affirmation vision of the Vedas, the worship of the terrestrial, the atmospheric, and celestial forces continues. The Devas and Devis continue to inhabit the land as they did since time immemorial. Hindus worship their gods and goddesses.

And Hindu Dharma is the order of the day.


(The writer taught Political Philosophy at a Canadian university . Her academic training is in Philosophy, Political Science, Political Economy and History ).
http://haindavakeralam.com/HKPage.aspx?PageID=13694

HIGHJACKING ANTI-CORRUPTION MOVEMENT:ROBBERS YELLING THIEF, THIEF!!!

Anna Hazare’s Campaign - truly Gandhian, truly evil - I


The End Result

by

Radha Rajan

The truth is simple and direct. Anna Hazare has replaced Baba Ramdev as the central figure in the nation’s war against corruption in exactly the same way that Gandhi replaced Tilak and Aurobindo within the Indian National Congress; and for the exact same reasons: no people’s movement in Hindu bhumi will be allowed to be led by a conscious Hindu, no campaign in this country will be allowed to wear a Hindu face; the critical difference being as events proved, Ramdev is no Aurobindo.

Aurobindo, having studied and judged Gandhi for what he was, was not impressed by Gandhi’s premature, motivated and imposed mahatma-hood, was not intimidated by his undeserved stature and refused to meet Gandhi anytime in both their lifetimes. Not so Baba Ramdev and as we read from newspaper reports, not the RSS either. Living up to the writer’s firm and disheartening belief that Hindu organizations and Hindu religious and political leaders doing politics, armed with nothing more than their colossal egos

1.have no political sense;

2.can be intimidated into compliance

3.can be coerced into proving their imposed inclusive credentials by being seen in the company of non-Hindus and anti-Hindus in their work,

4.can be pressured into sailing with the wind even if the wind is leading them astray

Baba Ramdev belittled his saffron robes and the RSS demonstrated appalling poor judgment by visiting the hero of the Cheltenham tragedy at Jantar Mantar to extend their support - support which he did not need, did not acknowledge or respect.

Baba Ramdev and the RSS, who stood in Hazare’s shadow and sang the chorus to his NGO-authored song, urgently need lessons in political history - the Hindu view of the freedom struggle and its end result to be exact.

Sonia Gandhi and her minions in English television news channels were taken aback when Baba Ramdev galvanized the nation against endemic corruption afflicting every arm of the state and every aspect of public life. Reeling under the still unfolding saga of meta-corruption, the Congress party denounced Baba Ramdev’s foray into politics and advised him to confine himself to giving tummy-tucking lessons in Yoga.

Baba Ramdev’s campaign against corruption, which was seen as attacking the Congress and its imported President, had an explosive beginning on February 27 at Ramlila grounds in Delhi with a blood-curdling mammoth gathering of around two lakh people; but all major English newspapers and English TV news channels, in stark contrast to their contrived hysteria over Anna Hazare’s campaign, either blacked out entirely or made only passing reference to the start of what would soon become Baba Ramdev’s cataclysmic campaign against corruption in public life.

Baba Ramdev followed Delhi with Goa, Chennai and Bangalore and at every stop the movement against corruption gathered unstoppable momentum. Sonia Gandhi and her handlers in the Generic Church had to move fast to stop the Ramdev juggernaut and contain the damage.

The writer had observed on an earlier occasion that the Church has the unmatched capacity to turn all events, including adversities, adroitly in its favour. In less than two months the Church changed the face of the people’s movement against corruption. The saffron-clad Hindu religious face of the movement was replaced by the Gandhi cap; and Baba Ramdev’s movement which was aimed directly at Sonia Gandhi was now turned into a movement directed by Sonia’s minions in the NGO industry.

The Church and the world feel safe again as idiot Hindus - film stars, students, upwardly mobile professionals, lawyers, judges and politicians - indulged their craving for catharsis to cleanse their corrupt, guilt-ridden souls and gathered penitently around Anna Hazare’s toothless belligerence under the Gandhi cap.

Breaking his thunderous ‘fast-unto-death’ in just 97 hours, the first thing that Anna Hazare said was, "The most significant thing about this movement was that it had no religion". What Sonia Gandhi and her NGO industry speaking through Hazare actually meant was Baba Ramdev and by extension all Hindus had been effectively de-fanged and marginalized. This was now Sonia’s show all the way.

In light of this wholly Freudian slip Baba Ramdev and the RSS must ask themselves and tell us why they extended support to this man. It would be well for Baba Ramdev to observe silence for a fortnight and introspect upon why the campaign he had launched with such fanfare and success came to such an ignominious end; as for the RSS it has proved yet again that it lacks the drive and the will to equip itself with the intelligence and skill to do even simple politics and succumbing yet again to the pressure to sail with the wind, the RSS placed itself with eyes wide open on the wrong side of an important issue.

The RSS is still laboring without direction stuck with antediluvian ideas and methods because it has not summoned the courage to discard powerbrokers doubling as in-house intellectuals.

The fatal weakness of sailing with the wind afflicts not just the RSS; it afflicts all Hindus without exception. The Hindu competition to Reliance-funded think-tank, the Observer Research Foundation, called Vivekananda International Forum (tired old faces manning a new desk) conducted a two-day seminar in Delhi last week and invited Arvind Kejriwal as one of the speakers.

Yet another RSS affiliate, India Policy Foundation, not to be left behind the mainstream which was sailing furiously with the wind, also invited Kejriwal to speak about corruption. Vivekananda International Forum and India Policy Foundation invited Kejriwal because Baba Ramdev showed off the Magsaysay awardee as a prize catch in his movement; and these are Hindu think-tanks. Talk about oxymoron.

The writer has come to the conclusion that Hindus doing politics do not think, do not read and do not listen. The Vigil book on NGOs detailing the lives and deeds of NGOs and a certain species of social activists, published in 2006, had entire sections and even chapters dedicated to Arvind Kejriwal, Harsh Mander, Sandeep Pandey and others of their ilk; and yet even Baba Ramdev relied on these very personages to adorn his movement - Kiran Bedi, Swami Agnivesh, Arvind Kejriwal and Mallika Sarabhai, to name just four.

It has to be repeated and repeated yet again, that when the RSS sent its letter of support to Anna Hazare it chose to ignore the explosive material contained in the Vigil book on NGOs and despite knowing the unhealthy company which surrounded and powered Anna Hazare’s hunger strike, the RSS went ahead and announced their support to the man.

The writer will bet her last pair of dog-eared shoes that the RSS had not read the fine print of the papers that Hazare’s NGO friends were shoving in the face of the nation and its in-house intellectuals in the Vivekananda International Forum and India Policy Foundation had not read it either or if they had, did not understand the import of what they were reading.

Headlines Today, CNN IBN and my favorite-for-all times Times Now in the last three days competed fiercely to project three-year and nine-year olds with balloons and ice-cream in hand and earnest-looking bespectacled management graduates from Pune and Penzance as the face of mass frenzy to tell us why we must all march to Jantar Mantar or at least allow our soul to take wing and fly there, or at the very least, like the RSS, send letters of support because, and smile when you say it, ‘Anna is doing it for me and you’.

Remember Jesus died for your sins and mine and those of our great grand fathers and mothers and great grand sons and daughters, be they Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Parsi or Jew? Just as bizarre is the generic Church’s propaganda that Anna Hazare is doing Gandhi-like fast-unto-Jesus-like death for me and my great grand sons and daughters.

Anna Hazare’s actions will therefore be judged by -

•The end result
•His inspiration/role model and
•The company he keeps
While the entire episode beginning with Hazare’s threat to fast-unto-death and the course the melodrama traversed until the moment Hazare broke his fast will come in for ruthless analysis, the end result of the Cheltenham melodrama-turned-farce merits immediate attention. The end result is that the Government of India for the second time in 12 years succumbed to blackmail which was instigated, goaded, aided and abetted yet again by English TV news channels. The UPA government, like the NDA government in 1999, capitulated to a bunch of anti-national blackmailers.

It is hard not to question the timing of it all. Just as Baba Ramdev’s anti-corruption juggernaut seemed like gathering greater momentum with every passing day, Anna Hazare, out of the blue, one fine day, announced that he was going on a fast-unto-death until the Lokpal Bill was passed or whichever happened first.

Surrounded by familiar, notorious and discredited NGOs, social activists, one disgruntled lady police officer and one activist danseuse, Hazare put on his Gandhi cap, climbed up the well-arranged and well-equipped dais and sat himself down on a hunger strike. To retain the focus on the end result of the media-driven blackmail, we will telescope the events between Anna Hazare sitting down on day one with microphone in hand to day four when microphone in hand Hazare announced he would end his hunger strike because the government spine had finally been broken.

The writer is convinced that Anna Hazare was the single stone useful instrument with a colossal ego, chosen for his Gandhi cap, to bring down two mangoes - one, push the Prime Minister into a corner and send him the unmistakable signal not to think or act independently of the imported Congress President; two, resurrect the defunct NAC by pushing some member NGOs and activists to center-stage by staging this dangerous blackmail melodrama. Needless to say, both mangoes were intended for Sonia Gandhi’s consumption.

By handing over the letter of support to Anna Hazare through their ubiquitous spokesperson, the RSS has only strengthened Sonia Gandhi vis a vis the Prime Minister and the Indian parliament. Anna Hazare and the bunch of NGOs and activists blackmailing the government from behind Hazare in the Gandhi cap, have demanded that the government should pass the Lokpal Bill with draconian provisions which will give them the right to usurp the powers of parliament, judiciary and the police and make them a three-in-one monster body with vast scope for misuse and abuse of power.

There are two drafts of the Lokpal Bill - one that has been drafted by successive governments, a version that is available with the incumbent government in some form and the second which has been drafted by Hazare’s foreign-funded NGO camp. Just so did the same group of NGOs and foreign-funded activists act through the Lawyers Collective to get the Domestic Violence Bill amended and passed in 2005 by the UPA government as the Domestic Violence Act.

When Baba Ramdev and the RSS went to Jantar Mantar to express their solidarity with Hazare and these NGOs and when they extended their support, what exactly were they supporting?

The draft Lokpal Bill, as crafted by Kejriwal, Agnivesh, Kiran Bedi, in collusion with Prashant Bhushan an activist lawyer, demands that members of Lokpal be conferred with judicial and police powers. These appointed members will form their own investigating team, will summon persons to depose before them, will initiate action, will order prosecution and will also mete punishment. Sonia’s NGOs and foreign-funded social activists with the full support of all English Television news channels were all pushing Hazare to fast-unto-death to impose an oligarchy under Sonia Gandhi’s leadership to rule the country, by-passing every and all national democratic institutions! This is what Baba Ramdev and the RSS supported -

Section 12 of Hazare’s draft Bill states -

Lokpal to be deemed police officer

•For the purposes of section 36 of Criminal Procedure Code, the Chairperson, members of Lokpal and the officers in investigation wing of Lokpal shall be deemed to be police officers.

•While investigating any offence under Prevention of Corruption Act 1988, they shall be competent to investigate any offence under any other law in the same case.

Section 10.2 of their draft Bill says -
We are also deemed judiciary

(2) For the purpose of any such investigation (including the preliminary inquiry) the Lokpal shall have all the powers of a civil court while trying a suit under the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, in respect of the following matters, namely:-

a.Summoning and enforcing the attendance of any person and examining him on oath;
b.Requiring the discovery and production of any document;
c.Receiving evidence on affidavits;
(3) Any proceeding before the Lokpal shall be deemed to be a judicial proceeding within the meaning of section 193 of the Indian Penal Code

Lokpal, after getting such enquiries and investigations done as it deems fit, may take one or more of the following actions:

a.Close the case if prima facie, the complaint is not made out or

b.Initiate prosecution against public servants as well as those private entities which are party to the act

c.Order imposition of appropriate penalties under CCS Conduct Rules Provided that if an officer is finally convicted under Prevention of Corruption Act, major penalty of dismissal shall be imposed on such government servant.

d.Order cancellation or modification of a license or lease or permission or contract or agreement, which was the subject matter of investigation.

e.Blacklist the concerned firm or company or contractor or any other entity involved in that act of corruption.

Baba Ramdev and the RSS have supported Anna Hazare’s fast-unto-death whose end objective is to force the government to accept this blackmailing group’s version of the Lokpal Bill arrogating to themselves unbridled powers of parliament, police, CBI, CAG, judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one as shown above. Sonia Gandhi’s NGOs have forced Manmohan Singh’s government to accept all their demands which essentially renders the Indian Parliament, the highest democratic institution of the country with powers to impeach judges and even the President of India, totally redundant.

The generic Church is selling gullible idiots in the nation the lemon that what the nation’s investigating agencies, police, parliament and judiciary have failed to do, Lokpal can and will do - impeach judges and Presidents for dessert even as they punish politicians and bureaucrats for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Such was the media-instigated hysteria over the fasting Gandhi cap that the nation collectively put its brain to sleep. Subjecting the components that will go to make the Lokpal to intense scrutiny is in order. The three core components of the Lokpal are -

•Who are the people constituting Anna Hazare’s drafting committee which will draft the Lokpal Bill

•The law itself (assuming the Bill is passed by a frightened and cowering parliament) and its provisions

•Members of Lokpal who will enforce and implement the law

•The selection panel which will appoint the all-important members of the Lokpal

The melodrama has already turned to farce with Kejriwal, Kiran Bedi and co. bickering fiercely over who should form part of the drafting committee and who should become members of the supra-god selection panel which will select members who will constitute the Lokpal. Greed and overarching ambition lie at the root of all corruption and these have already given the country a preview of what lies in store for the nation if this group is allowed to become the ruling oligarchy under Sonia Gandhi. The fight to squat on the floor in the corner in the same room as Sonia Gandhi can only get bloodier and noisier.

We have already seen the relevant sections of Hazare’s draft Bill which confers upon our foreign-funded activists who aspire to become Lokpal Members, the high status of deemed police and deemed judiciary. Now the norms for constituting the selection panel which will appoint the members is even more of a give-away of what really is the real intention behind this melodrama to pass the Lokpal Bill. Hazare, Kejrival, Agnivesh and co. have listed -

•The Chairpersons of both Houses of Parliament
•Two senior most judges of Supreme Court
•Two senior most Chief Justices of High Courts.
•All Nobel Laureates of Indian Origin
•Chairperson of National Human Rights Commission
•Last two Magsaysay Award winners of Indian origin
•Comptroller and Auditor General of India
•Chief Election Commissioner
•Bharat Ratna Award winners
Baba Ramdev and the RSS Sarsanghachalak really should tell us if they saw this before offering their support to Hazare. Did Shri Mohan Bhagwat know that Hazare came with a huge baggage which also included this draft Bill and Hazare’s views on who should be made members of the Selection Panel? Let us cast our eyes back to 2004 when Sonia Gandhi rode piggyback on the Congress and its shameless Hindus to rule the country as de facto Prime Minister. There is no UPA, no INC, no Cabinet and no Government of India. There is only Sonia Gandhi.

Sonia Gandhi made the choice of who will sit in the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The distasteful controversy surrounding Sonia Gandhi’s choice is of her making

Sonia Gandhi appointed the CEC
Sonia Gandhi appointed the CAG
Sonia Gandhi appointed the CJI
Sonia Gandhi appointed the Director of the CBI
Sonia Gandhi appointed the CVC

Every constitutional office, every high institution has been defiled and diminished because of the choices that Sonia Gandhi made. The NAC is also a creature of Sonia Gandhi’s making. Members of the NAC are the personages around Anna Hazare on the issue of the Lokpal Bill. While most categories for consideration to choose members of the Selection Panel have a direct or indirect Sonia Gandhi connection, the Magsaysay Awardee and Nobel Laureate suggestion is downright Machiavellian. There is a Rothschild and Rockefeller connection in these categories

Considering the sweeping powers that Hazare, Agnivesh, Kejriwal and idiot Hindus want for the Lokpal, considering that the Lokpal wants to be judge, jury, police and parliament in their dealings with politicians, bureaucrats and judges, to insist on foreign entities having a say in constituting the Selection Panel must cause grave disquiet in every thinking nationalist mind. Amartya Sen is married to Emma Rothschild who is a member of the Jewish Rothschild banking family in England while the Magsaysay Award has a direct Rockefeller connection.

The Magsaysay award may sound Asian because it is named after the late Ramon Magsaysay of the Philippines but the award is all American and the money component of the award is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The Vigil book on NGOs exposed the intent behind the selection of persons for the Magsaysay award. Like the Nobel peace Prize, the Magsaysay too, no matter for what reason and in which category it is awarded, is political in its ultimate intent. To have a Rothschild and Rockefeller connection to the Lokpal no matter how distant and how remote is still nothing to laugh about.

There is no doubt in the writer’s mind whatever that forces outside the country instigated these NGOs and social activists, Sonia loyalists all and the English print and electronic media to select a Gandhi cap to stage a drama whose purpose is ostensibly to pass the Lokpal Bill. If the ruse succeeds in parliament, and it will not succeed, not in its current form, then the Lokpal is the least of our worries. Like the arrest of the Kanchi acharyas, this melodrama, in the view of the writer, was a test case. This experiment was conducted to test -

If Hindu can be replaced by Gandhi in 2011 as was done in 1909
How Hindu organizations react in times of mass hysteria
The power of the media in setting in motion a course of events to move in a specific direction

The capacity of the Indian government to withstand pressure - pressure from blackmail and pressure of public opinion even when the opinion is manufactured by the media

Anna Hazare was foisted on the nation by unseen forces; these forces used NGOs loyal to Sonia Gandhi to conduct this experiment and the writer’s worst nightmare turned real. Hindus and Hindu organizations failed and failed roundly to read the situation correctly from start to finish. Hindus proved yet again that they will readily pant behind every red-herring shown to them as long as it wears the Gandhi cap; the RSS and Hindu religious leaders being no exception. It is left for India’s parliament to defeat this diabolic plot by not allowing the Lokpal Bill to be tabled by these forces. By all means let us have a Lokpal Act but it has to be national and nationalist.

The writer is left with a question that will not go away. Did Baba Ramdev’s overseas constituency goad him to choose corruption over cow slaughter, over the alarming imbalance in religious demography and over the state of Hindu temples? It would seem so. The last three could not have been hijacked by Sonia Gandhi and her minions to her benefit. Corruption, as was proved, was a different matter. (To be concluded)

Radha Rajan
11th April, 2011.

LEFTISTS' AND FEMINISTS' COMFORTABLE INTEGRATION IN WESTERN SOCIETIES

Emancipating the Left and Feminists

by

Dr. Gautam Sen

http://www.india-forum.com/articles/143/1/Emancipating-the-Left-and-Feminis
Published with the kind permission of the author.

A quiet revolution has been sweeping the Western world. It is the
integration into mainstream society of the two radical movements that
emerged during the political upheaval of the 1960s. Many Leftist radicals
who once protested the Vietnam War and argued in favour of the dispossessed
have now lined up behind President George Bush Jr., cheering on the utter
destruction of Iraq. The women’s movement in the West has also come full
circle and re-discovered their real enemy of long-established colonial
folklore, non-white men. Their own are doing some sporadic labour in front
of the kitchen sink and occasionally delivering the children to school and
are now comrades-in-arms. They stand shoulder to shoulder together to
confront a much greater threat out there against Western civilisation
itself.

The former Leftist radicals of that era, nowadays anxiously thronging the
gates of the sedate British Academy and entering it too, turn out to have
never been what they sought to project. Much of the anti-Soviet Trotskyite
Left was a creature of Western intelligence services. The latter was not
worried about radical student protest as such, reasoning intelligently that
it was all part of teenage angst and growing up pains. But they were very
concerned about a whole swathe of highly educated middle class students,
with pro-Soviet sympathies, potentially ending up occupying sensitive
positions within the establishment at some later date. Quite understandably,
they feared that once compromised early in life through contact with Soviet
agencies they might become life-long Soviet moles, doing untold damage to
Western interests.

The response of the intelligence services was to promote Trotskyism. The
implied premise was that advanced Western democracies were better suited
to the Marxist musings of the cosmopolitan sophisticate Leon Trotsky and the
inferior Asiatic, Stalinist variety should be denounced and resisted.
Trotskyism was already a bitter enemy of Soviet communism and unlikely to
assist it against the Western democracies. The intelligence services also
quietly set about infiltrating the Leftist radical movement, dominated by
the Trotskyite Left, and recruited some of its key leaders. They also funded
it in various ways by, for example, buying bulk institutional subscriptions
to their publications, including some of the hallowed radical journals that
emerged in the period. Quite clearly, some of the leaders had become paid MI5
agents as well, the sophisticated counter-intelligence organisation of
Britain. Any local damage radical students did on the street level by
putting up posters in upmarket commercial areas, urinating against lampposts
and hurling the occasional missile against the police was considered
entirely tolerable.

The antecedents of some members of the current British Cabinet vindicate the
astuteness of the judgement of the intelligence community that the young
radicals would eventually tire of it all and rejoin the political
mainstream. Indeed some the young radicals had come from wealthy, upper
class backgrounds and were probably easy to corrupt because personal
contacts could be exploited. The activities of these erstwhile radicals
today confirm their murky origins because they have become public supporters
of on-going Anglo-American imperialist wars against third world societies.
Thy include some of the most famous radical names of the period from France,
Germany and Britain, including the most renowned radical Marxist
theoretician in the latter. He and a leading German philosopher now
apparently support carpet bombing Iraq, and Kosovo as well in the latter
case, to advance the class struggle no doubt!

A similar phenomenon has overtaken their US counterparts too, raising
intriguing questions about the nature of their original involvement in
student and 1960s radicalism. European Left radicals have also sought
legitimacy for contemporary imperialist wars by ensuring the co-operation of
their Leftist third world co-conspirators, often occupying positions of
influence within their own societies. This execrable group has always sought
intellectual and emotional sustenance from the Western Left and their
livelihoods depend on various forms of intelligence-derived sponsorships,
i.e. the funding of local NGOs and lucrative foreign assignments. A small
fragment of these third world Leftists has been accommodated within Western
academia, mostly conniving as fraudulent human rights activists.

The women’s movement, primarily an educated middle class affair, though it
did have wider socio-economic repercussions for women as a whole has also
made progress by leaps and bounds. The door to well-paid, high status
professional jobs has largely opened to them though a glass ceiling to the
very top for significant numbers remains somewhat unbroken. Nevertheless,
changes in the past forty years have transformed opportunities for this
dominant white feminist cohort. Well-paid jobs galore in the public,
quasi-public and private sectors have altered their matrix of choices. Once
combined with the incomes of their partners, life is unusually comfortable
for this new aristocracy, the beautiful people, apt to quote Proust in
English and Yeats in French. A whirl of parties, good food, excellent wine
and genteel discourses on third world poverty and the awfulness of
patriarchy in such societies preoccupy them. And all under a gratifying
public gaze.

The one final frontier, concerning how to get domestic chores done, has been
overcome by employing hourly-paid third world women, barely human enough to
be noticeable through crystal wine glasses in manicured hands. It wouldn’t
really do to irritate the well-paid liberated partner who loves to
demonstrate his political consciousness by changing the occasional nappy. He
himself is also eager for his partner’s success in her high income career
that allows a lifestyle that most, the world over, will not enjoy in several
centuries to come, if ever. And Rosie from Manila or Ruth from Accra do need
the money to send back home to feed their children.

One final piece of the jigsaw completes the wondrous world of self-seeking
deceit. A small, but influential group of non-white feminists in Europe and
the America have joined in with hysterical denunciation of their own ethnic
and religious progenitors. The paradox of their situation, like that of the
entire comprador intelligentsia abroad, irrespective of gender, is that they
are only paid to interpret their societies of origin. And their unspoken
brief is to demonise them and legitimate their subjugation and destruction
by Western imperialism.

Their own personal assimilation, indeed escape from the terrifying abyss of
their origins, occurs through relationships with white partners. It is
strikingly noticeable that Asian women in the Western media, academia and
the professions rarely have partners from within their own community. Access
to this privileged white world and their sense of personal self-worth are
anchored to this inter-racial imperative. Despite complex subterfuges and
deceptions about opposition to Western imperialism their emphatic hostility
to third world self-assertion, even when subliminal, legitimates deadly
assaults against it.

(Dr. Gautam Sen formerly taught political economy at the London School
of Economics).

AMARTYA SEN'S DANGEROUS DELUSION OF JUSTICE

Amartya Sen: The Dangerous Delusion


4/06/2011 23:15:59

by

Dr. Vijaya Rajiva

Courtesy: Haindavakerala http://haindavakeralam.com/HKPage.aspx?PageID=13579

Nobel Prize winner (Economics, 1998) Amartya Sen’s new book, "The Idea of Justice" (2009), is an interesting work, written in a chatty latter day Wittgensteinian style. It seeks to deal with the age old controversy in Western thought between Contract Theorists (in the Lockean tradition) and the situational ethics of thinkers such as Adam Smith, Condorcet, Karl Marx et al. In the former camp is the late John Rawls whose major work,"The Theory of Justice" (1971), became important not only for its continuation of classical liberal theory but its advocacy of distributive justice.

Dr. Sen argues on the side of the second group. He takes issue with Rawls but also agrees with him in important ways. The book is impressive for its acknowledgements, an 8 page list (pps.21-28) of who’s who in Western academia. But as a philosophical work it is not rigorously argued (perhaps that was not the author’s intention !).

Whatever the niceties of Sen’s position the present writer will speak about those issues in some other venue. Here, we will concern ourselves with the important question for India, the dangerous delusion that Sen engages in while theorizing about the importance of reasonable accomodation in human conduct and political affairs, depending on any given situation. In essence he is advocating an abstract rationality in politics (unintentionally!) and he does this in an interesting but somewhat distorted way by engaging with the dilemma that Arjuna faced in the battle of Kurukshetra. This part of his book is only a few pages long, but is internally connected with the arguments of the entire book.

Arjuna, as Sen sees it, stands for "nyaya," while Krishna stands for "niti." Nyaya is easily understood as justice and niti can be understood as custom or tradition . Sen does not use the word Dharma which is the best word to use in the context of the dialogue between Sri Krishna and Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Dharma is not only custom and tradition but encompasses a whole set of ethical and moral values that are not simply considered by Sen. He dismisses them as coming under the rubric of ‘religion.’

Arjuna, as is well known, is in a dilemma before the battle with the Kauravas who are cousins and who had banished Arjuna (and the Pandavas) to the forest in order to seize their kingdom. This was an unjust act and on their return after the period of banishment the Pandavas go to battle with the Kauravas. Arjuna’s dilemma is that he is not only engaged in the act of killing his kith and kin but also engaging in a general carnage of blood letting. In his anguish he turns to his mentor and advisor Krishna, who advises him to realize his Dharma and go to battle.

Hence, according to Sen, Arjuna’s dilemma is threefold:

1.Social Relevance : the significance of human lives. Hundreds of human beings will be killed in this war.
2.Personal Responsibility: he, Arjuna, is personally responsible for the act of destruction.
3.Positioned situation: he is killing those near and dear to him. Ethically speaking one has to be specially concerned with those nearest to us, such as one’s own family, children etc. (Of course, here he is not killing children or one’s immediate family, but kith and kin and those, moreover, who have been hostile to him and his own near and dear ones).

Dr. Sen calls all these three dilemmas a part of Nyaya or a broad based view of justice in human relations. Krishna, on the other hand, invokes a narrow Niti. Arjuna is a warrior and his duty is to defend Dharma (Sen oddly does not use this word, but that is the meaning). The Kauravas are engaged in adharmic conduct and should be defeated.

Sen, does not clarify whether Arjuna was right in going ahead with the battle or whether he himself would have called on Arjuna to withdraw from the battle. This ambiguity in Sen’s presentation of the debate is telling. But the entire thrust of the philosophical arguments of the book point in the direction of favouring a withdrawal.

What then would he advocate when India finds itself in a situation of dire threat?
Can reasoning with the enemy help, even though one would not like that outcome?
Can India roll over and play dead when terrorist strikes are imminent, for instance?

Or should Indians prepare themselves for any eventuality? Sen does use the phrase the ‘just war’ but does not elaborate on the more relevant (for the Indian situation) ‘defensive war’.

Instead he goes into a bizarre comparison of Robert Oppenheimer(who did his duty as a physicist and helped to develop the atom bomb to help his country) with Arjuna’s dilemma. Japan had surrendered and there was no need to have dropped the bomb, which was directly made possible by Oppenheimer’s actions. (Editor's note: "Although it was Truman's decision")

The more relevant comparison would have been the second world war, where many Arjunas, both inside Germany and outside would have anguished at the thought of war.

For Indians, their Dharma (however narrowly interpreted) is clear : they have to be prepared for any eventuality, and the defensive war, if and when it comes, must be fought without hesitation, to defend the Motherland. Had Indians in the past, clearly realized their Dharma, the two major Occupations (the Islamic and the British) could have been avoided.

Arun Shourie put it well when he said : We did not ask for it, but it has been imposed on us.

Vande Mataram !

(The writer is a Political Philosopher who taught Political Philosophy in a Canadian
university)

TALES IN INDIAN SECULARISM : by N S RAJARAM

Tales in Indian Secularism

by

N.S. Rajaram -

Courtesy: http://www.newsgram.com

(Picture of Mahatma Gandhi -not copied)
Gandhi often aligned himself with rank communal leaders like Maulvis and Maulanas


Going back to Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian politicians and intellectuals have never stopped proclaiming that India is a secular country. A secular country, or more properly a secular state is one in which religion plays no part. The first modern states to constitutionally mandate secularism were the United States (through the First Amendment) and the Republic of France following the French Revolution. The Indian Constitution as originally adopted (in 1950) makes no mention of secularism. It was introduced into the Constitution by Indira Gandhi during the Emergency.

The need for secularism in Europe arose because of the stranglehold which the Church had on all areas of life including the government and education. Popes, bishops and other church officials insisted that the government was only the ‘secular arm’ of the Church, and kings existed only to implement the wishes of the Church. The history of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire (5th century) to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and even beyond was dominated by religious wars. Gradually, over the centuries, the rulers and the people of Europe freed themselves from the clutches of the Church. Deeply influenced by this history, the Founding Fathers of the American Republic never allowed religion any place in the state.

Islam has no place for secularism. It recognizes only religious law or the Shariat. The Quran is not only the prayer book it is also the law book. It is different in the Hindu tradition. The priest could never be the ruler even though his advice was sought. Vishwamitra, who used to be a king, had to give up his kingdom and engage in austerities before he was recognized as a seer. When King Bharata adopted a son of sage Bharadwaja as his heir because his sons were unfit to rule, he could no longer be a rishi. The most famous instance is of Prince Siddhartha Gautama leaving his kingdom to become Sage Buddha.

But people calling themselves ‘secularists’ in India have turned this history and tradition on its head by attacking Hinduism as ‘communal’ while tolerating and even justifying theocratic institutions and movements. Nehru of course is well-known as a leading advocate of this so-called secularism. Some secularist intellectuals attack Hindu (and other) groups that advocate a uniform law – that is, a legal code which is the same for all religions. They justify it by invoking Gandhi’s name as the last word. But Gandhi often aligned himself with rank communal leaders like Maulvis and Maulanas as we shall soon see.


In a famous (or infamous) episode known as the Shah Bano case Rajiv Gandhi caved in to Muslim pressure and had a law passed denying support to divorced Muslim women
This is conveniently ignored or even falsified by secularists. Economist Amartya Sen, who like Arundhati Roy seems to think that his celebrity as an economist gives him the freedom to say anything he wants recently wrote: “Mahatma Gandhi was staunchly secularist in politics and insisted on effective separation of the state and the religions.” This is patently false. Here is the true story.

When Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in 1914, circumstances allowed him to rapidly gain control of the Congress party. Gandhi used his position to launch the Nonviolent Non-Cooperation Movement to gain Swaraj (self-rule). Muslim leaders like the Ali brothers (Mohammed Ali and Shaukat Ali) did not share his vision but simply found him useful to push their own communal agenda. Their main interest was not freedom for India but the restoration of the Sultan of Turkey following Ottoman Turkey’s defeat and dismemberment in the First World War. This was known as the Khilafat movement which finds little mention in Indian history books. They saw India as an Islamic country that had been taken over by the British.

It is important to recognize Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement was launched not to free India but to restore the Sultanate of Turkey. He promised support for the Ali brothers’ Khilafat in exchange for their support and the support of Muslims of India for his Non-Cooperation Movement. In fact, he went so far as to support their theocratic goal by defining Swaraj as Khilafat! In Gandhi’s words: “To the Musalmans Swaraj means, as it must, India’s ability to deal effectively with the Khilafat question. … It is impossible not to sympathize with this attitude. … I would gladly ask for the postponement of the Swaraj activity if we could advance the interest of the Khilafat.”

So Swaraj according to the ‘secular’ Gandhi meant freedom to bring back Islamic rule! Indian history books carefully leave out the Khilafat fiasco, which Gandhi equated with Swaraj and for which he launched the Non-Cooperation Movement. If they mention it all, they present it as a unifier of Hindus and Muslims. The reality is quite different. It resulted in a massacre of thousands of innocent Hindus all over India. It was particularly virulent in Kerala where a Jihad (Holy War against infidels) called the Mopla Rebellion erupted which took the British several months to put down. It began as a Jihad against the British to restore Islamic rule. When it failed to drive out the British (as Gandhi had promised), it was turned against Hindus (and Christians) who were totally unprepared. After all Gandhi had promised them it would be nonviolent.

What was the Mopla Rebellion like to make secularist historians shy away from it? Sankaran Nair an eyewitness to its horrors had this to say: “For sheer brutality on women, I do not remember anything in history to match the Malabar [Mopla] rebellion. … The atrocities committed more particularly on women are so horrible and unmentionable that I do not propose to refer to them in this book. …literally hundreds might be selected from the English and vernacular papers…[of the period].” (Gandhi and Anarchy by Sir C. Sankaran Nair.)

What was Gandhi’s reaction to the Mopla outrages? At first he denied that the atrocities took place at all. But he could not keep it up for long in the face of overwhelming evidence including reports from his Muslim friends. He then rationalized it as part of their religion. He called the Moplas “God fearing” and said they “are fighting for what they consider as religion, and in a manner they consider as religious.” This from the Apostle of Nonviolence! It applied to the victims, but the perpetrators were excused as ‘God fearing’ because they were acting according to their religion which sanctioned violence against unbelievers.

This was too much for Annie Beasant. That spirited Englishwoman wrote: “It would be well if Mr. Gandhi could be taken into Malabar to see with his own eyes the ghastly horrors which have been created by the preaching of himself and his “loved brothers”, Mohammed and Shaukat Ali. … The Moplahs murdered and plundered abundantly, and killed or drove away all Hindus who would not apostatise. Somewhere about a lakh of people were driven from their homes with nothing but their clothes they had on, stripped of everything…Malabar has taught us what Islamic rule still means, and we do not want to see another specimen of the Khilafat Raj in India.”

So Gandhi, far from being secular, began his political career in India by supporting a strictly theocratic movement to establish an Islamic state (Khilafat Raj) as an adjunct to the restored Caliphate headed by the Sultan of Turkey! The final irony is that the Turks themselves had no use for their Sultan or the Caliphate. They kicked out the Sultan-Caliph (actually pseudo-Caliph). Their leader Kemal Ataturk also abolished Islam as state religion calling it an Arab superstition. Turkey became a secular state while Gandhi campaigned for Khilafat Raj in India!

This is the man about whom Amartya Sen unabashedly wrote: “Mahatma Gandhi was staunchly secularist in politics and insisted on effective separation of the state and the religions.” This is not the only instance of Sen engaging in blatant falsehood. In a different context, Sen tried to whitewash the persecution of non-Muslims in Medieval Spain with the words: “…when the Jewish philosopher Maimonides was forced to emigrate from an intolerant Europe in the 12th century, he found a tolerant refuge in the Arab (Muslim) world.”

This was too much for the Arab scholar Foujad Ajami who denounced Sen’s whitewashing by pointing out: “This won’t do as history.” The truth is that the ‘intolerant’ Europe Maimonides had to flee happened to be Spain then under Berber Muslim rule, which Ajami pointed out “made the life of Spanish Jews… utter hell.” But a lie can become the truth if propagated in the name of secularism, especially by an eminent (or pseudo-eminent) figure; at least according to Amartya Sen, Arundhati Roy and their ilk. Its oracle was Jawaharlal Nehru.

As India was about become free, Gandhi suppressed the strong nationalist leader Sardar Patel and anointed his favorite Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister. Gandhi had previously eliminated Netaji Subhas Bose as potential rival by forcing him into exile. Nehru was less a nationalist than a product of Western colonial attitudes. His first act as prime minister of independent India was to ask the Viceroy Lord Mountbatten to continue as Governor General. He then took the Kashmir dispute to the United Nations on Mountbatten’s (and his wife’s) recommendation, against the advice of Sardar Patel and the Indian Army. (Nehru detested the military.)

As India was about become free, Gandhi suppressed the strong nationalist leader Sardar Patel and anointed his favorite Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister. Gandhi had previously eliminated Netaji Subhas Bose as potential rival by forcing him into exile. Nehru was less a nationalist than a product of Western colonial attitudes. His first act as prime minister of independent India was to ask the Viceroy Lord Mountbatten to continue as Governor General. He then took the Kashmir dispute to the United Nations on Mountbatten’s (and his wife’s) recommendation, against the advice of Sardar Patel and the Indian Army. (Nehru detested the military.)

It is not widely known that Nehru wanted to take the Hyderabad dispute with the Nizam also to the UN, but Sardar Patel put his foot down. By then Mountbatten was gone and C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) was governor General; and Rajaji supported Patel. Had Nehru and Mountbatten had their way, India might have been saddled with a ‘Hyderabad Problem’ in the heart of the country to go with its Kashmir Problem.

It is not widely known that Nehru wanted to take the Hyderabad dispute with the Nizam also to the UN, but Sardar Patel put his foot down. By then Mountbatten was gone and C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) was governor General; and Rajaji supported Patel. Had Nehru and Mountbatten had their way, India might have been saddled with a ‘Hyderabad Problem’ in the heart of the country to go with its Kashmir Problem.

(Picture of Annie Besant - not copied)
Annie Besant was truly a secularist in the righteous way


Nehru also continued the colonial British policy of supporting divisive forces while suppressing nationalist aspirations in the name of secularism. To begin with, on the advice of the unscrupulous English missionary Verrier Elwin, he allowed missionaries in the northeast leading to the alienation of what are now Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh. While forcing changes in the Hindu legal code, he allowed Muslim and Christian leaders to retain legal authority. Even today, it is possible in Kerala for church leaders to deprive women of inheritance by invoking a medieval Christian code. Most extraordinarily Nehru also introduced the Haj Bill to provide government subsidy for pilgrims going on pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. This act of Nehruvian secularism is still with us.

Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi was not anti-nationalist like her father, but was entirely unscrupulous in the use of power. She introduced the word ‘secular’ in the Indian Constitution during the Emergency. But she was a woman of courage. That however was not true of her son and successor Rajiv Gandhi. In a famous (or infamous) episode known as the Shah Bano case Rajiv Gandhi caved in to Muslim pressure and had a law passed denying support to divorced Muslim women.

(Picture of Shah Bano- not copied)
Shah Bano, a 62 year old Muslim woman and mother of was divorced by her husband in 1978


Shah Bano, a 62 year old Muslim woman and mother of was divorced by her husband in 1978. The Muslim family law (marriage, gifts, inheritance, adoption and a few other civil laws are under the purview of personal laws in India – they are different for Christians, Muslims and Hindus) allows the husband to do this and also the wife: the husband just needs to say the word Talaq (meaning divorce) three times before two witnesses for a valid divorce. (This unequal treatment is thanks to Nehruvian secularism.)

Shah Bano, because she had no means to support herself and her children, approached the courts for securing maintenance from her husband. When the case reached the Supreme Court of India, seven years had elapsed. The Supreme Court ruled that Shah Bano be given maintenance money, similar to alimony. There was a huge outcry by Muslim leaders like Syed Shahabuddin who threatened to take their case to the streets. Rajiv Gandhi bowed to their demands and passed law in the Parliament that invalidated the court decision and upheld Islamic court ruling. He justified this blatantly communal act as an example of secularism in action.

After Rajiv’s death, the sordid saga of cowardice and disregard for women’s rights was followed by his widow and successor Sonia Gandhi. This came to the fore in a notorious human rights case that has drawn international attention. When Imrana, a young Muslim woman was raped by her father-in-law, a self-appointed Muslim body calling itself the All India Muslim Personal Law Board issued a fatwa (ruling based on Sharia or Islamic law) that the rape had made the victim Imrana ‘impure’ (haram) and as a result her marriage to her husband stood annulled. Adding insult to injury, it directed Imrana to leave her husband and live with her rapist father-in-law as one of his wives! It may be noted that in ‘secular’ India, polygamy is legal for Muslims but a punishable crime if practiced by non-Muslims. (So a Muslim judge with several wives can sentence a non-Muslim for polygamy.)

After Rajiv’s death, the sordid saga of cowardice and disregard for women’s rights was followed by his widow and successor Sonia Gandhi. This came to the fore in a notorious human rights case that has drawn international attention. When Imrana, a young Muslim woman was raped by her father-in-law, a self-appointed Muslim body calling itself the All India Muslim Personal Law Board issued a fatwa (ruling based on Sharia or Islamic law) that the rape had made the victim Imrana ‘impure’ (haram) and as a result her marriage to her husband stood annulled. Adding insult to injury, it directed Imrana to leave her husband and live with her rapist father-in-law as one of his wives! It may be noted that in ‘secular’ India, polygamy is legal for Muslims but a punishable crime if practiced by non-Muslims. (So a Muslim judge with several wives can sentence a non-Muslim for polygamy.)

There were protests all over India and the whole world reacted with shock. Salman Rushdie, himself a victim of religious persecution, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times denouncing Sharia (Islamic law) and religious bodies like the All India Muslim Personal Law Board. In the midst of this storm, Mrs. Gandhi refused to come to the aid of the victim, or even condemn the atrocity. Instead, she directed the government’s law minister and her closest aide H.R. Bharadwaj to issue a statement exonerating the Muslim Personal Law Board— on the ground that the government cannot “interfere” in a matter touching on religion!

Conventional political wisdom holds that such cowardly acts by Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi were motivated by vote bank politics, that is, to gain Muslim votes. There could be another stronger motive—fear of street violence directed possibly against them. Wikileaks has revealed that the former president Dr Abdul Kalam wanted Afzal Guru, who had been convicted for the terrorist attack on the Parliament to be hanged. But Sonia Gandhi opposed it and opposed also a second term for Dr Kalam.

Conventional political wisdom holds that such cowardly acts by Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi were motivated by vote bank politics, that is, to gain Muslim votes. There could be another stronger motive—fear of street violence directed possibly against them. Wikileaks has revealed that the former president Dr Abdul Kalam wanted Afzal Guru, who had been convicted for the terrorist attack on the Parliament to be hanged. But Sonia Gandhi opposed it and opposed also a second term for Dr Kalam.

To be enlightened, secularism must be combined with humanism. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were secular figures, but they were also among the worst mass murderers in history. Unfortunately, the Indian Nehruvian brand of secular is not truly secular but also anti-humanist.

In summary, what Nehru and his successors have created is not a secular state but a multi-headed theocratic jumble in which the law of the land is different for persons of different faith. India will become secular only when the law of the land is the same for everyone and there is total separation of the state from religion. Half measures and sophistry will not do.

Dr. NS Rajaram is a distinguished historian with several laudable works on history to his credit. He is also an Adjunt Professor with University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth.

THE ENEMY WITHIN : AN AWAKENING NOTE FOR HINDU INDIANS

The Enemy Within

28/03/2011 23:18:40

Dr. Vijaya Rajiva

http://haindavakeralam.com/HKPage.asp

In a remarkable event at the India Today Conclave Dr. Subramania Swamy spoke honestly and forthrightly on the question of how there cannot be social harmony in the Indian subcontinent until the two proselytizing religions Christianity and Islam accept that India is a Hindu majority country with a long history of religious tolerance that was shattered with the coming of the Islamic and Christian (British) regimes. It ended with the Partition of Akhanda Bharat and the successive ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Bangladesh, Pakistan and within Indian itself, in the state of Kashmir.Nearly 500,000 Kashmiri Hindus were driven out of Kashmir merely because they were Hindus. The Hindu population of Bangladhesh which had been 35% is now
<7%. Likewise in Pakistan.

As Shri R.Venkatanarayanan, former Secretary to the Government of India, later former National Secretary of the HDAS (Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha) and currently Advisor to Swami Dayananda Sarasvati, put it :

“As far as I can recall, this is the first time in India that an eminent person has spoken so openly from a non-religious platform that social harmony in India, a religiously pluralistic society, is dependent on how Christianity and Islam conduct themselves in regard to Hinduism. Unless what Sri Swamy has brought out is assiduously buried deep by vested interests (the media will do its best to do so) the consequence in civil debate in India is likely to benefit social harmony. Hindus are the best neighbours in the world, provided their toes are not trampled upon."
(in an e-mail to Breakingindia.group)

(Readers may watch Dr.Swamy’s speech at the India Today Conclave at http:vimeo.com/21342400)

Dr. Swamy might have added that there is an enemy within, the deracinated Hindus of
India who have inherited the Macaulayian mantle and who now will be subjected to
the ongoing brainwashing by the left/liberal shenanigans of the University of Chicago project in New Delhi. This pertains to the establishment of an adjunct university to be set up at the University of Delhi, to be headed by no less a personage than the noted anti-Hindu academic Martha Nussbaum (Nussbaum is her married name, and she is divorced from that gentleman; she herself was born into a Christian family in the U.S.).

As Rajiv Malhotra (author of the book Breaking India 2010) pointed out: “What Macaulay failed to do will be accomplished by Martha Nussbaum” (in his comments to the Breakingindia. group). However, here too Shri Malhotra has temporarily forgotten the real damage that Macaulay’s educational system inflicted on the Indian subcontinent(and which is mentioned in the book Breaking India) along with the ongoing colonial Occupation of India. This was long before Nussbaum. She merely inherited Macaulay’s children, as they are called.

The destruction of the highly effective and organized Hindu educational system that existed prior to the advent of both the Occupations (the Islamic and the British) was one key and the other was the military domination and the economic exploitation by the colonial power. Hinduism as a religion could not be exterminated, this both the Islamic and the British rulers saw quite early on. Nor could the majority of the population be changed in its socio religious practices.

But a creamy layer could be created which would not only be enticed by the advantages of money and power but also by what Belgian scholar Dr.Koenrad Elst has called the colonizing of the Hindu mind. To continue that train of thought, the present writer would like to add the word ‘amnesia.’ Everything related to Hindu history had to be obliterated from the Hindu mind.

At this stage the revision of Hindu history by the Western revisionists, aided by their Indian counterparts, had begun. The post independence era saw a continuation of this process with very slight modifications only. Romila Thapar is a classic example of an Indian historian following the Western paradigm of writing Indian history.As a result, decolonizing the Hindu mind (to use Koenraad Elst’s phrase) has to begin with the opposite of amnesia, namely anamnesis, a remembering.

This is made easier for the educated elite by the staunch persistence of Hindu belief and Hindu worship by the majority of the people. The ‘aam admi’ (common man) is not only the producer of the wealth of the country by which the parasitical class lives, he/she is the staunch upholder of Hindu tradition, upholder and practitioner of the Hindu way of life.

Endless attempts by the ruling elite to describe and dismiss and eliminate Hinduism as Brahmanism have ended in failure. Attempts by avante garde writers such as the redoubtable Arundhati Roy to revile and anathematize the ‘Brahmanic Hindu state’ have ended in failure. This is simply because the construct of ‘Brahmanism’ is a straw man. Since the time of the Vedas, there has been an unbroken tradition of a way of life, of worship, of texts and rituals, which gathered momentum and enrichment with each century, an ongoing process which has defied the machinations and maneouverings of the Asuric forces (phrase coined by a Hindu in the diaspora).

And a new Hindu renaissance such as occurred in the 19th century amongst the educated elite seems to be in the offing, despite the thralldom of material and economic success.

Hindu India is fighting back, and hopefully it will not be only the aam admi that will carry the burden. And it will not only be the Sangh Parivar organizations that will carry the banner aloft.

Indian intellectuals have started a critical remembering. An outstanding example is Dr.Shrinivas Tilak’s book Reawakening to a Secular Hindu Nation (2008). Written by a scholar familiar with both Western and Hindu thought, this book is sure to provide a great impetus to that parallel line of enquiry that the present writer has talked about elsewhere, in conjunction with the polemical and pathbreaking historical perspectives of the book Breaking India (2010).

Breaking India provides a new interpretation of what passed as scholarship in the West concerning India. The book also gives a detailed analysis of the Dravidian-Christian nexus that seeks to balkanize India so that the Christian evangelical project may succeed.

Reawakening to a secular Hindu Nation shows how a secular Hindu polity is in keeping with the profound spiritual philosophy of Madhav Rao Golwalkar (Guru Golwalkar). The present writer has traced briefly the outlines of the book in a book review which the reader may usefully consult before proceeding to the complexities of the book, which also has a sensitively written Foreword by Dr. Shreekumar Vinekar. The book review may be consulted in the book review section of Haindava Keralam .

(http://www.haindavakeralam.com/HKPage.aaspx?PagelD=9628&SKIN=l )

The aim of the author is to demonstrate that since the ancient past the state in India has always been secular, functioning within the parameters of a Hindu nation (Hindu Rashtra). Indians have inherited a civilization with common life-ideals and a life-philosophy based on values that today can be described as inclusive and pluralistic.

The Hindu Nation thus has been a continuously unifying idea and practice (pragatan) in the life of the peoples of the subcontinent. This process got submerged, though not destroyed, during the various conquests, invasions and occupations (vighatan). The way out is reawakening to this idea (sanghatan).

In his Foreword Dr. Vinekar observes:

“Very few scholars of India that is Bharat, reborn after the horrendous vivisection of Bharat that was India bothered to ask . . . What then is this Indian, this “new secular person” being re-moulded in the crucible of ‘secularism’ described as being independent of Dharma . . . since 1947?” Dr. Tilak following Madhav Rao Golwalkar asks this question and attempts to provide some answers.

Anamnesis or remembering, then, is a two pronged effort: that of counteracting the
false consciousness engendered by the asuric forces (*Editor's Note: This can be termed, "Cultural Miseducation") and the remembering and recovering of Hindu Dharma.

The process has begun in earnest in the last three decades or so with the
rejection by Indic scholars of the Aryan Invasion theory. This was followed up
by work on the discovery of the ancient river Sarasvati mentioned in the Rig
Veda. Dr. S. Kalyanraman, Director of the Sarasvati Research Centre, has
sponsored conferences on the topic.

He has also authored a book on the Sarasvati Sindhu civilisation script titled
Indus Cipher (2010).

Currently, there are two important works "Breaking India" by RM & AN (2010) and
Dr. Shrinivas Tilak's "Reawakening to a Secular Hindu Nation" (2008).

(The writer is a Political Philosopher who taught at a Canadian university).

*Editor's Note: See "Cultural Miseducation: Historian's Pitfall" on this blog.

CANCEROUS CHURCH EATS INTO DRAVIDIAN PARTIES IN TAMIL NADU POLITICS

Tamil Nadu Politcs: Cancerous Church Eats into Dravidian Parties

by

Radha Rajan (RR)

Dear all: HAF should perhaps read this to see who sold them the lemon.
If only Hindus connect the dots and see the frightening picture that emerges. Read together with Shri Rajiv Malhotra's post about Dravidian Christianity on Huffington Post. Hindus must read, listen and disseminate more and more so that the Aryan-Dravidian fable and the Christian machination is thoroughly exposed. RR


Church Agenda as Dravidian Ideology


Twice in the last two years the Church[i] pushed the DMK government into a corner making it look helpless, ineffective and worse, supposedly drifting away from its ideological moorings. The DMK was accused by Tamil chauvinist splinter parties for not leveraging its status as partner in the UPA government to stop Mahinda Rajapakse from decimating the LTTE to its last man. The Church won its first major political victory in Tamil Nadu politics when the LTTE was presented not merely as the face and voice of the Tamil-speaking people of Sri Lanka, but was made congruent with the idea of Tamil People.



Note: From when it first invented itself two thousand years ago, in the kind of politics that the Church has perfected in every continent that it invaded and conquered, Tamil People is not the same as Tamil-speaking people.



The idea of Tamil People/Tamil Nation was a natural progression from the seed of anti-Brahminism and it was the DMK which propagated it in the ‘60s decade as a political idea and it was the DMK which had consistently and aggressively voiced Tamil Nadu’s concerns about the political inequities suffered by Sri Lanka’s Tamil-speaking minorities; and yet, by operating through its adherents and Tamil chauvinists from within the smaller fast-mushrooming Dravidian splinter parties like the MDMK, the PMK and the Viduthalai Chiruthai (VC) the Church put the DMK on the back-foot and on the defensive. The beginning of the transformation of the DMK from a sovereign Dravidian party into a Church-reactive, defensive party had begun; only the DMK was in denial about the role of the Church in the unfolding events.



On the second occasion, the DMK because it was the ruling party in the state, had to perforce stand by the Tamil Nadu police in the police-lawyer stand-off in 2009; the government had to stand by its police officers because Justice Ibrahim Khalifullah in the Madras High Court and the former CJI KG Balakrishnan in the Supreme Court adopted unconscionable partisan positions on the issue; and while letting off the striking, lawless lawyers with a mild rebuke, the courts humiliated the police by holding them guilty of contempt of court.



The Tamil Nadu Bar especially the Madras High Court is unabashedly political; lawyers of Tamil Nadu’s courts reflecting TN’s polity, are vertically split broadly into the DMK and AIADMK factions while an emerging section can be engaged as rent-a-crowd by any party which wants violence to be let loose in court campuses. A significantly large section of TN’s lawyers had been on strike from 2008 boycotting the courts ostensibly on the issue of Sri Lankan Tamils, but actually in support of the LTTE.



A violent confrontation between striking lawyers and the police compelled the state government to make a choice between the state’s law-enforcing forces and the lawyers who constituted a sizeable Dravidian electoral constituency. Had the state government not done so, the result would have been a demoralized police force which would have refused to act, leading eventually to spiraling violence and total anarchy in the courts and on the streets. The kind of lawyer rowdy-ism bordering on terrorism that the country witnessed in TN was also linked to the idea of Tamil People.



Both cases had imprints of the Church’s grubby hands all over them.



The taming of Jayalalithaa into a submissive Church agent was completed in record time. The Church’s calibrated measures to lead the Brahmin-led AIADMK back to non-Brahmin Dravidian political objectives began when Jayalalithaa arrested the mathathipathis of the Kanchi matham in November 2004. The Church’s measured steps gathered momentum when Jayalalithaa –

Admitted Vai.Gopalaswamy ‘Vaiko’, the Christian head of the MDMK, whom she had incarcerated previously under NSA for his pro LTTE and seditious speeches, into the AIADMK orbit Invited five Christian priests, including a Bishop to her Poe’s Garden residence on Christmas day in 2008 for solemn Christian prayers. He made promises galore to TN Christians in her election manifesto for the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.


In a complete turnaround from the earlier stated position of her party, declared on the campaign trail in 2009 that she now believed that the secessionist state of Tamil Eelam was the only solution to the civil war in Sri Lanka
Promised the Christian community during her recent visit to Kanyakumari that when with the blessings of Jesus Christ and the good wishes of Christians she would win the Assembly Elections in April 2011, she would use state treasury funds to send Christians to Jerusalem on pilgrimage; that she thought no one could deny Christians their right to build churches anywhere they wished; she had already committed her party in 2009 to creating the Christian state of Tamil Eelam.


The lateral expansion of Tamil Nadu’s Dravidian politics today in terms of tenets and scope as break-away heresies from the parent Justice Party bears a startling resemblance to the lateral expansion of Islam and Christianity as break-away heresies from their parent Judaism. Like the Abrahamic break-away heresies, TN’s Dravidian parties too were nothing more than organized bodies of extremist/maximalist cult worshippers; and the hate-filled political rant of the central cult figures like EV Ramaswamy Naicker, CN Annadurai, Mu. Karunanidhi and now Thol.Tirumavalavan is passed off as Dravidian ideology.


World history proves that when new religions and ideologies were invented by individuals who offered themselves for cult worship within the Abrahamic families, these cults and cult figures never desired to be a part of the continuum but set themselves up as independent entities around a new power center which chose one aspect, one principle or one tenet from the parent ideology/religion as the principal idea around which to strengthen the heretic group. If we must understand the dynamics of anti-Brahmin/anti-Hindu Dravidian politics in Tamil Nadu, we must understand the common features of all break away Abrahamic heresies:

All of them retain the basic genes from the parent; in this case, conquering the world for their jealous god who will not co-exist with other gods
One principle or idea, usually an idea born of hate or confrontation is developed to give them an independent identity.

All of them denounce the parent as an imperfect being and offer themselves unabashedly as improved versions of the parent, their predecessor or both
All of them, without exception seek power - social, political and money power
All of them want territory with their respective central cult figures as new gods
Because they all retain the basic genes from the parent and because moving away from one heresy into another poses no ideological/existential dilemma to the new convert, such movement across the Abrahamic spectrum is discouraged with great violence – Catholic to Protestant to Anglican to Orthodox to Pentecostal and other new missions or from Judaism to Christianity, Islam to Christianity or vice versa.

Because all Abrahamic ideologies, parent and heretic offspring alike, are about political power and control of territory, Abrahamic ideologies are always about numbers.

In the absence of numbers in the early stages of existence, violence and terror are the usual methods for getting the converts and for terrorizing and subjugating the target people and nation.

The Periarite groups and parties, the DMK, AIADMK, MDMK, PMK and the Viduthalai Chiruthai all retain anti-Brahmin as their core ideology; this has expanded to include anti-Hindu, anti-Hindu temples, anti-Sanskrit, anti-North India, anti-Hindi and anti-anything as opportunism demands; all of them have demonstrated at one time or the other their ever-preparedness for violence.

The anti-Hindu Dravidian politics which developed around the hate-filled cult of ‘Periyar’ EV Ramaswami Naicker’s Self Respect Movement in the erstwhile Madras Presidency is therefore only an Abrahamic heretic clone.

Taking their cue from the creation of the Muslim League in 1906, the Justice Party also known as South Indian Liberal Federation was created in 1916 by powerful non-Brahmin zamindars and non-Brahmin forward castes as a political instrument with a limited objective - to demand more non-Brahmin representation in colonial government and administration. Even though the Justice party was formed to serve non-Brahmin political interests, the founders and early members of the party TM Nair, Sir P Thegaraya Chetty, the Rajas of Bobbili, Ramnad and Panagal were practicing Hindus and did not subscribe to Tamil secessionist theology associated with later Dravidian political cults.

While the Justice Party rejected extremist formulations which would destabilize society in a manner hoped for by the Church, its creation was nevertheless a step in the intended direction. It was the beginning of caste-identity politics which successfully fragmented not only Hindu consciousness but Hindu society too by pitting jaati against jaati besides accepting without question the Church’s missionary propaganda of ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ castes, ‘forward’ and ‘backward’ castes.

The political marginalization of the Brahmins had begun and the Church had every reason to be pleased; the Brahmins were the weakest link in the Hindu chain and pressure had been successfully exerted on the weakest link. The long-term grand plan was to make Hinduism congruent with Brahmins, dis-empower the Brahmins and hopefully this would weaken Hinduism, and eventually dis-empower Hindus politically by de-Hinduising the polity. The Church hoped that the fall of South India to Church machinations would knock down the Hindus like skittles in the rest of India, segment by segment, from the political arena and from all seats of power.

This may still happen if India’s polity, especially Hindus like Lalu and Mulayam, notional Hindus like Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar and deracinated Hindus in the INC and BJP do not see even now the ultimate purpose of religious conversion and the real purpose behind the thousands of crores of foreign money that is pumped every year into the country by western governments and foreign churches.

The Christian state of Tamil Eelam was critical to Christianizing South Asia and must be seen together with the Church orchestrated upheaval in Nepal and the on-going mischief in Myanmar.

Having created and then deepened previously unknown fault-lines in Hindu society, the Church now simply had to wait for natural dynamics to take their course from the point of origin called the Justice Party. It did not have long to wait and three centuries of missionary propaganda about the inherent evil and inequities of varna and jaati vyavastha together with the cancerous spread of the Church in South India yielded bountiful results in the form of EV Ramaswami Naicker.

Naicker joined the Indian National Congress in 1919 but quit the Congress in 1925 to form the Self Respect Movement. Periyar’s Self Respect Movement was everything that the Church had hoped for. It positioned itself against the Brahmins – the one community the Church feared the most, retained the non-Brahmin identity of the parent but went much beyond it in scope.

The Self Respect Movement was not merely non-Brahmin in its identity but also virulently anti-Brahmin and anti-Hindu. If the Justice Party was a political vehicle like the Muslim League, then the Self Respect Movement was like the Khilafat Committee and had well-defined socio-religious objectives; more to the point, like the Khilafat Committee it was not constrained by compulsions of electoral politics to observe social and political niceties.

Periyar’s violent anti-Brahmin and anti-Hindu campaign which entailed defiling and destroying Hindu temples and murtis and abusing Brahmins and Hindu gods in offensive language in public speeches sent shock-waves across the Justice Party besides causing intense revulsion among a section of its leaders. To cut a long story short, in less than a decade, the fortunes of the Justice Party and Self Respect Movement became a zero sum game.

When the Justice Party lost the Provincial elections in 1937, several of its leaders abandoned the party and joined the Self Respect Movement. In 1938 Periyar merged his Self Respect Movement with the Justice Party (just as Jinnah persuaded the Khilafat Committee to merge with the Muslim League around the same time), took control of Justice Party and renamed it Dravidar Kazhagam in 1944.

By 1944 there was little doubt that Periyar EV Ramaswami Naicker was the inevitable manifestation of the cancerous Church in TN politics.

The Justice Party was a creature of European Christian missionary intent which fanned the flames of anti-Brahminism as a political ideology in the Madras Presidency in the late 19th and early 20th century. The anti-Brahmin political ideology was a natural consequence of the insidious anti-Brahmin and anti-jaati anti-varna campaigns carried out by European Christian missionaries for three centuries in South India; the bizarre Aryan Invasion Theory was a natural progression of the core idea. The Church’s long-term intent was to sow seeds of discord among the different jaatis, break the jaati and varna vyavastha to cut the socio-cultural and religious roots of Hindus, and then step into the void.

Anti-Brahmin political ideology, as it was conceived and executed, became anti-Hindu because of the cancerous idea underlying the Aryan Invasion Theory with ‘Periyar’ EV Ramaswamy Naicker’s Dravidar Kazhagam as the most vocal and powerful proponent of the theory. The resulting anti-Hindu trend in TN polity was fertile soil for Politics of Abrahamic Minority-ism which in turn was exactly the direction in which the Church intended for Dravidian politics to travel. The Church did not have to be seen to be planting the tree; it simply had to sow the seed of poison weed and wait for the weed to sprout.

It is doubtful if it ever occurred to Naicker, or if his acolytes even today see him that way, but Periyar EV Ramaswami Naicker and all Dravidian parties which followed the Dravidar Kazhagam with anti-Brahminism as the only driving force were creatures of the Church. The resulting anti-Hinduism, Tamil Nation for Tamil People all derived only from this point of origin.

What Dravidian Tamil chauvinist parties from 1916 until 2011 claim to be Dravidian ideology rooted in Self Respect is nothing more than Christian missionary agenda for Tamil Nadu.

‘Periyar’ traveled extensively abroad for two years between 1929-1931 through countries as diverse as Russia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, England, France and Germany. Had Naicker been a man of acute political sense or at least an honest man, such extensive travel ought to have shown him the genocidal path that Islam and the Church were traveling even then to expand across continents and he should have judged his own society and the religious-civilisational roots of his culture by American and European Abrahamic standards.

Instead Naicker chose to retain the Church’s fabrication of the Aryan-Dravidian race theory as the core of his Self-respect Movement and later his Dravidar Kazhagam in what may only be termed swallow-and-vomit intellectualism.

Goa, Kerala and TN were the favorite breeding grounds for European missionaries and facing the kind of challenge they did in India which they had not faced when they exterminated entire cultures, religions and peoples first in Europe and then in North and South America followed by Africa, the missionaries set about the task of understanding societal dynamics in Hindu India.

It did not take them long to understand that it was the organic jaati and varna vyavastha and the formidable moral authority wielded by Sanyasis and Brahmins which did not allow Christian missionaries to penetrate Hindu societies. Moral authority vested in Brahmins and Sanyasis should not be confused with temporal power which was vested in different collectives with different responsibilities.

When Brahmins, both the marginally few who were affluent and the vast majority of whom were economically backward, took to English-education, pursued government employment and became doctors, engineers and judges, their hold over their villages and local communities slackened in two generations resulting in irreversible consequences not only for their community but also for the villages and temples they left behind. Effectively they left the field open for Christian missionaries and anti-Hindu Dravidian ideology to take root.

Brahmana and Sanyasa dharma embodied exemplary values – austerity, self-denial, ahimsa, Learning and imparting Learning; the accruing moral authority maintained inter-jaati equilibrium and stability in society. Women and elders in every jaati and varna, Brahmins and Sanyasis were acknowledged as know-ers of dharma. The Portuguese, having understood the critical and central role of the Brahmins, simply picked up the Sword of Christ and decimated the Brahmins of Goa to the last man, woman and child. Only one choice was given to the Brahmins – convert or die.

Without going into excruciating details about the diabolic tactics which Constanzo Beschi, GU Pope, Di Nobili and other charlatans of their ilk adopted in South India with the sole objective of usurping the moral authority vested in Brahmins and Sanyasis, suffice it to say that while some learnt Sanskrit and Tamil, others pretended to be Brahmins and Sanyasis by sporting the tuft, sacred thread, saffron robes and living a life of bogus austerity.

Realizing that Inquisitions of the Portuguese variety in Goa would almost certainly inflame the non-Brahmin Hindu martial castes against them, Italian and British Christian missionaries knew that they could penetrate Hindu society only by becoming a cancerous cell that lodges itself quietly and unnoticed within the bloodstream of the body it intends to kill.

This cancerous missionary cell, which was manufactured in the sixteenth century in TN, when it pretended to be Brahmins and Sanyasis and when it adopted local customs and language, was dignified by the Second Vatican Council with the nomenclature ‘enculturation’.

Enculturation is a cancerous cell and is a political weapon in Christian hands in the war to conquer territory.

Sonia Gandhi is far and away the best example of ‘enculturation’ of the Constanzo Beschi and Di Nobili kind. When she ‘encultered’ her Christian, Roman Catholic Italian identity in the sari, when she sported the bindi and waved her hand in conscious imitation of her mother-in-law, and when she was planted inside the family and home of India’s Prime Minister, it had already been decided that she would be the cancerous cell within the Indian National Congress and by extension, in the body politic of the Hindu nation. ‘Indian National’ Congress lost its meaning once again as did the INC-led freedom movement supposedly to free the nation from White Christian colonial rule.

Once penetration into society was achieved, the cancer called the local resident missionary began to spread the disease in the body. It has always been the way of the Church to defame and defile the highest institutions in target communities, create a vacuum, and then step into the resulting unrest and instability to offer its Jesus-cult religion as solution. Taking note of the moral authority wielded by Brahmins in society, the Church trained its guns on Brahmins and Hindu scriptural texts. It crafted the diabolic Aryan Invasion theory which said –

Brahmins were an alien race called Aryans who invaded the country, defeated the native populace or Dravidians and drove them away from North-India to the South
The Vedas are the roots of Hinduism and the Vedas are composed in Sanskrit
Brahmins spoke Sanskrit while the defeated Dravidian race spoke Tamil (Kannada and Telugu, languages in the Dravidasthan as conceived of by the Church and Naicker have been placed on the back burner for the present in favour of Tamil. Tamil holds preeminence now in Church calculations because Dravidian ‘Tamil’ can be expanded into Tamil People and Tamil Nation)

Persons of the eminence of Asko Parpola and Iravatham Mahadevan, not immune to pecuniary and other benefits accruing from Dravidian state patronage have now begun to mouth the preposterous theory that the language of the Saraswati-Indus script is Dravidian.

This poisonous Aryan-Dravidian propaganda inter alia also meant –

Hinduism is only Brahminism (the Romilla Thapar brand of history writing uses this language). Because the Vedas are the roots of Hinduism and the Vedas are composed in Sanskrit and it is the religion of the alien race which invaded and occupied this land, Tamil-speaking Dravidians are not Hindus.

Dravidians are not Tamil-speaking Hindus in South India but are Tamil People (Tamil Inam) with a culture that has nothing to do with Hinduism.

Saivism, the religion of the Tamil People of Dravidasthan, is Tamil Saivism and therefore is not Hinduism.

The cancerous objective was to eat away the umbilical cord binding Tamil Hindus to Hindus in the rest of India and replace it with a sense of anti-Hindu Dravidian Tamil and anti-Hindu, non-Hindu Church ‘Tamil’ ness.

This was the lemon sold to Kashmiri Hindus too in the name of Kashmiriyat. The Kashmiriyat lemon was sold to Kashmiri Hindus by Kashmiri Muslims (almost certainly this fiction was fabricated in the colonial Christian mind and its potential allowed to sprout in the Kashmiri Muslim mind) which said, we Kashmiris are unique and so Kashmiri Hindus have more in common with Kashmiri Muslims than with the Hindus in the rest of India.

This is vintage Christian war strategy - de-link the target community from its parent, give it a sense of separateness resulting in alienation, render it defenseless, alone and vulnerable and then step in for the kill. The political propaganda that Sikhism is not Hinduism, Jainism is not Hinduism is a piece of the same diabolic Church fabric. Sikhs and Jains who mouth this Church fiction must look at the tragic fate of Kashmiri Hindus which does not warrant repetition here.

While the political trajectory of Dravidian anti-Hindu politics is now better understood, what has so far escaped the notice of political observers and commentators is the picture that emerges when we connect the dots. First, the growing numbers of break-away heresies within the Dravidian fold –

Justice Party 1916 (non-Brahmin zamindars and forward castes) – Self Respect Movement 1925 – Dravidar Kazhagam 1944 (EV Ramaswami Naicker) – Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam 1949 (CN Annadurai, Karunanidhi) – All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam 1972 (MG Ramachandran, Jayalalithaa). For the moment, all latter-day heresies which followed the AIADMK in quick succession, including Tamil Muslim and Tamil Christian heresies are left out of the reckoning.

The new heresy around the cult of MG Ramachandran dealt a near-mortal blow to the hitherto unchallenged heresy, the DMK. From 1972 when the AIADMK (ADMK as it was then called) was formed until today, the DMK and AIADMK have successfully played the Bad cop/Good cop routine with the Hindus of TN. The rise of the DMK was marked by physical abuse of Brahmins in public spaces –

Cutting off their sacred thread

Dragging Brahmin men by their tufts and in several instances even cutting off their tuft (apocryphal stories about Chanakya and the evil Dhananand tell us how King Dhananand gave Chanakya the choice between death and cutting off his Brahminic tuft)
Obscene and vulgar depiction of Brahmin men and even women, their customs, traditions and their way of life in Tamil films.

Public calls to make Brahmin women the common property of non-Brahmin men
Increasing shrill calls for seceding from the Indian Union and the beginning of usage of political phrases Tamil People and Tamil Nation which found prompt echo and support in American/Western think tanks and their foreign policy jargon.

MGR’s AIADMK departed marginally from what was widely recognized as Dravidian politics in that MGR did not encourage public humiliation and physical abuse of Brahmins; but significantly he did not depart even minimally from the anti-Brahmin and anti-Hindu Dravidian tenets and policies. Nevertheless, the good cop role assumed by MGR triggered a frenzy of covert political activity by the Church in neighboring Sri Lanka.

Neither the LTTE, nor demands by other splinter Tamil separatist groups for the secessionist Christian state of Tamil Eelam were accidents of history.

The Church, notwithstanding its much splintered body, is one as regards the ultimate political objective; and the Church Hierarchy comprising its Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, Priests, Pastors, monks, nuns and Christian laity constitute the army of Christ; each segment of the army working within different sections of the target society and nation without losing sight of the goal – Church-control of communities leading to Church-control of the polity followed by Church-control of the state, as in government.

Conquest of nations by the sword or by the cancer called religious conversion ever remains the sole objective of the Church. When the Church’s dream of Dravidasthan comprising the whole of South India fragmented into Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, the Church changed tracks and began to work on the notion of Tamil Nation comprising the whole of Tamil Nadu in India and the North and East of Sri Lanka.

The notion of Tamil People had already been sowed by the Church both in India and in Sri Lanka and had taken root. The Church’s most promising offspring, the violence-prone DMK had been well groomed as the vehicle for Tamil People/Tamil Nation in India; it was time to deliver a similar creature in Sri Lanka and the emergence of MG Ramachandran in Tamil Nadu provided the perfect backdrop to unveil the Sri Lankan chapter of the Tamil Nation.

Born in a small town near Kandy in Sri Lanka to immigrant parents from Kerala, MGR’s Sri Lanka connection gave the Tamil Nation idea a personal, emotional edge which ultimately and totally unexpectedly, destroyed the movement, its terrorist vehicle and its sponsors in India; the idea of Tamil Nation itself suffered a serious setback.

At the time of independence in 1948 a peculiar situation prevailed in Sri Lanka where the politically assertive section both among the Sinhala and Tamil people were Christians, a situation which continues till the present day. This was the result of the almost total control of education and state patronage extended to Christian missionary schools and colleges by all colonial powers – Portuguese, Dutch and then the British.

Church-run schools, which received colonial state patronage and government funds, provided education in English as compared to the education in the vernacular languages in Sinhala and Tamil provided by temples and Buddhist monasteries. English education was mandatory for admission to institutions of higher learning which in turn led to employment in government institutions.

The Church in Sri Lanka, in an extension of its rice-bowl conversion in Africa, made admission to their schools and colleges conditional upon religious conversion to Christianity in what may be termed blackboard conversion. The Church in South India targeted the Tamil Nadar community similarly; thus within the same family those who opted to send their children to missionary schools converted to Christianity and were given alien foreign sounding Christian names.

Not surprisingly, in the early years of the twentieth century only those Sri Lankans - Sinhala and Tamil who were English-educated were employed by the British administration in government jobs and the same section emerged as frontrunners in the country’s polity too. Bandaranaike, Jayawardene, Lakshman Kadirgamar, Chelvanayakam and even Ranasinghe Premadasa, son of Richard Ranasinghe were all Christians. The Church had never had it so good; except that the notion of Tamil People which the Church had sown in society rebounded on the Church in an unexpected turn of events.

While the Church fabricated the Tamil People/Tamil Nation fiction in India vis a vis the Brahmins, its work to plant the cancerous cell in Sri Lanka was made easier because the Tamil language and its culture/people had to be presented as being separate only vis a vis the Sinhala language and its culture/people. The fact that both the Sinhala speaking people and the Tamil speaking people were civilisationally, culturally and religiously bound to Hinduism and bound by the umbilical cord to the Hindu bhumi in equal measure was pushed to the margins of their collective consciousness; and identity of language was privileged over civilisational identity.

The Buddhist clergy in Sri Lanka, like the non-Brahmins of Tamil Nadu, was a willing customer for Church peddled separatism.

The Church’s invidious propaganda about the separateness of Tamil People from the nationhood of Sri Lanka and about Tamil People being a distinct nationality with a right to their own territory not only worked like cancer in the Tamil psyche but also reactively in the Sinhala psyche. A brief look at Sri Lanka’s demography is in order to understand how and why the Church’s invidious propaganda succeeded in that country.

Sri Lanka’s demography as per language –

Sinhala – 74%

Tamil - 12.6%

Tamil of Indian origin – 5.19%[ii]


Religious demography –

Buddhism - 70%

Hinduism - 15%

Islam - 7.5%

Christianity - 7.5%

Sinhala speaking people are both Buddhists and Christians; Tamil speaking people are Hindus, Muslims and Christians. Except for a negligible percentage of Moors who are Muslims, the majority of Sri Lanka’s Muslims are Tamil-speaking just as all Sri Lanka’s Buddhists are Sinhala-speaking.

After independence in 1948, in a move to assert the Sinhala identity of the nation and to stem the trend of what the Buddhist clergy thought was disproportionate numbers of Tamil-speaking people (mostly Tamil Christians and negligible numbers of forward caste Tamil Hindus who did not need the Church’s missionary charity for higher education) in government employment, administration and high-end professions including politics, which the Buddhist clergy correctly attributed to Church-run English medium schools and colleges, the Buddhist clergy prevailed upon the Sri Lankan government to nationalize all educational institutions, impart education in the vernacular languages, and accord primacy once again to Pirivenas or educational institutions run by Buddhist monasteries.

Although the move to nationalize Sri Lanka’s education was formalized only in 1961, the trend towards non-missionary Sinhala and Tamil vernacular schools had already begun in the 1930s; but the government move to nationalize education in 1961 dealt a near-mortal blow to Christian evangelization and religious conversion when the most potent instrument for religious conversion, Church-funded and administered missionary schools and colleges were de-fanged, and unseated from their positions of preeminence. The front-end of the assembly line which was delivering Sinhala and Tamil Christian political leaders at the other end had been permanently disabled dealing a terrible blow to the Church agenda to control the government.

The Church’s Tamil People/Tamil Nation boomerang turned around and began to fly back at the Church. The Church trained its guns on the Buddhist clergy again, this time by sharpening the division between the Sinhala majority and Tamil minority by taking recourse to extremism in the form of the LTTE. Needless to say, the top leadership of the LTTE was Christian with notional Hindus in the LTTE cadre playing useful idiots to fulfill the Church agenda.

The time had come to give shape to the Sri Lankan vehicle for Tamil separatism to match the rise and growth of the DMK in Tamil Nadu. The measures that the Church took to realize the Christian state of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka and in Tamil Nadu were always well calibrated and in tune with events in both countries. The LTTE burst upon the political scene in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu in 1975; it follows that preparation for the launch must have started at least a few years earlier.

The success of the Church propaganda that the Tamil speaking people of Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu were a separate nationality can be gauged from the fact that while the Buddhist clergy, reacting strongly to Tamil separatism which had reared its head even before independence in 1948, wanted to push the Tamil speaking people of Sri Lanka to the margins of national life, it remained sanguine to the fact that every President that the country elected was Christian; Sinhala Christian. The Buddhist clergy was prepared to accommodate an Abrahamic religion into its conception of Sinhala nationalism while refusing to reach out to the civilisationally related Tamil Hindus who constituted 15% of the population.

Pitting brother against brother is classic Abrahamic/Christian war tactics going back to the Old Testament.

Christians who constitute 7.5% of the population were tactically distributed among the 74% Sinhala, 12.6 % Tamil and 5.19% Indian Tamil populace thus giving the Church a powerful leverage among all sections of the language divide.

The Sinhala-Buddhist Tamil-Hindu animosity had very little to do with religion while it had everything to do with language. The Sinhala-Buddhists and Tamil-Hindus alike failed to see the cancerous cell called the Sinhala Christian and Tamil Christian quietly embedded in their respective blood streams and who were the sole beneficiary from the internecine war between the Sinhala and Tamil speaking people of Sri Lanka.

The rise of MGR and the formation of the AIADMK coincided not only with the rise and emergence of the LTTE in Sri Lanka but also with the rise and emergence of the Sri Lankan communist party, the Janatha Vimukthi Perumuna or the JVP. Considering the role of the Church behind the Maoists of Orissa and Nepal it is tempting to wonder if the Church may not have had a hand in the creation of this new front with cadres drawn equally from among the economically backward Tamil and Sinhala speaking people in its early years. What cannot also be denied is that the Church has always adroitly turned every event, every phenomenon to its advantage.

The emergence of MGR, the return of Indira Gandhi in 1980 as Prime Minister, the rise of the LTTE and the rise of the JVP, proved to be a direct and four-pronged attack against the Sri Lankan government and an indirect attack against the primacy and power of the island’s Buddhist clergy. The Church was the only beneficiary of the three decades long civil war which tore Sri Lanka apart and which was ended with the determined extermination of the LTTE in 2010. Not only is the Church continuing to harvest Tamil souls in Sri Lanka but is also harvesting souls in Tamil Nadu’s refugee camps. The protracted civil war in Sri Lanka provided the Church with a bountiful harvest.

Indians outside Tamil Nadu remember the dismissal of the DMK government by Prime Minister Chandrashekhar in 1991. What is almost totally unknown is that the reviled LTTE was armed and trained by the Tamil Nadu and Indian governments in camps set up in Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka where India’s armed forces gave the LTTE full military training including in guerilla warfare.

The well-armed and trained LTTE cadre was then sent into Sri Lanka as deadly terrorists in a move which many foreign affairs experts believe was intended by Indira Gandhi and MGR acting in tandem to force the Sri Lankan government to the negotiating table and draft an equitable national constitution which would protect and guarantee equal rights for the Tamil speaking minority community.

While MGR who became Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu in 1977 was playing competing Dravidian politics with the defeated DMK around the core issue of Tamil People/Tamil Nation, for Indira Gandhi, who felt the urgent need to assert her strong-man image which suffered a setback in the electoral defeat in 1977, it was more a move to re-assert her one-woman regional super power status which the creation of Bangladesh had given her in 1971.

Indira Gandhi and MG Ramachandran may have acted for two entirely different reasons when they set up camps in Tamil Nadu and other parts of India to train, arm and finance the LTTE but they created a Bhasmaasura who turned upon the very people who made the LTTE invincible against the Sri Lankan government in the first place. Indira Gandhi was playing with secessionist fire at home and abroad – she created Bhindranwale and the problem of Khalistan and she created the problem of the LTTE and Tamil Eelam – fires which would soon engulf India, herself and her family.

It was not in the capacity of any state government in TN to militarily arm and train the LTTE without the tacit support and active involvement of the central government. Whoever was advising Indira Gandhi on foreign affairs did not have the nation’s interests in mind, that much is obvious when one retrospectively analyses the events of the critical 1970 and 1980s decade. It is not clear why Indira Gandhi and MGR privileged the LTTE over other Tamil political groups, parties and formations but it was this privileging and the money, arms and training provided to the LTTE which gave the LTTE the brute power and the motive to decimate the leadership and cadre of all other Tamil groups so that it could emerge as the sole representative of the Tamil-speaking people of Sri Lanka.

While the frightening growth of the LTTE gave the Tamil secessionist movement in Sri Lanka a phenomenal impetus, it also caused an equally strong reaction from India and the Sri Lankan government. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi brought to an immediate and full stop all help rendered so far to the LTTE; it also pushed the Sri Lankan government to equip its own army to deal with the LTTE.

Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the subsequent weakening of the Congress party ushered in the era of coalition politics and the huge returns accruing from participation in government in Delhi and the compulsions of coalition politics not only tamed the two major Dravidian parties into a semblance of nationalism but effectively turned Tamil Nadu away not only from the path of secessionism it had been treading for long under the Dravidian parties but also turned it away from the LTTE.

The Church had to regroup and formulate a new war strategy.

The rise of Brahmin Jayalalithaa within the ranks of the AIADMK and her eventual coronation as Gen. Secretary which shook the very foundations of Dravidian politics, the rise of the BJP in national politics, the fading lure of the idea of secessionist Tamil Eelam and weakening prospects of realizing it even within Tamil Nadu, and the new trend in Indian politics which catapulted both the DMK and the AIADMK to Delhi imposing upon them the primacy of national interests over interests of regional political parties forced the Church to forge new strategies and lay a new road towards its objective of carving the Christian state of Tamil Eelam.

The following trends emerged in Tamil Nadu more or less simultaneously from around the mid 1990s decade and continues till the present –

The Church began to invest in television news channels, schools of journalism and mass communication; the Church also pushed for creating the department of human rights in Tamil Nadu colleges and universities.

Foreign governments, notably the UK and US through DFID and USAID began to fund NGOs in India, primarily Christian NGOs.

Foreign Christian funding agencies like World Vision, Action Aid and agencies from Germany, France and the Netherlands began to fund churches and Christian NGOs
Tamil Nadu is the largest recipient of foreign funds.

The Church began to fund television soap operas and also financed Tamil films
Christians are entering the Tamil Nadu film industry and the small screen in almost every area – as directors, producers, actors and music directors
Tamil films and television Tamil serials routinely make reference to Tamil People and Tamil Nation.

The Church is buying hundreds of acres of land across Tamil Nadu; this is visible even in overcrowded Chennai. Christians are cornering a major chunk of the reservation quota in admission to institutions of higher learning and also in government jobs; there are growing numbers of Christian students in engineering, medical and law colleges and universities.

Churches and prayer houses are being built in almost every street in Chennai and close to every Hindu temple, big and small Churches are coming up even in the holiest of holy Hindu temple towns and they are being allowed by Dravidian parties to come up close to temples.

Foreign Christian missionaries from America, Malaysia and South Korea have a free run of the streets in Chennai.

Instigating fisher-folk communities is the Church’s latest ploy[iii]


Every penny and paisa that the Church spends, it spends as investment towards realizing its core objective – control of communities leading to control of polity leading ultimately to control of government culminating in bloody or bloodless conquest of territory. The path to this objective is religious conversion; what was achieved solely through enculturation in the 16th and 17th centuries, through the Church’s missionary educational and medical institutions in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries is now being achieved through NGOs, through an aggressive political discourse in religious freedom and human rights which always work only to the Church’s advantage to facilitate penetration, conversion and conquest.

Investing in political parties is the Church’s latest venture in Tamil Nadu. The Church’s investment, besides the time-tested and highly successful strategy of planting Christians in important ruling families through the love angle or as close confidants to politicians, is three-pronged -

Donate liberally and in proportion to expected returns to the two largest Dravidian parties. Besides the generous donations also get Christians to become members of every big and small political party – DMK, AIADMK, MDMK, PMK, DMDK so that these parties, with an eye on the Christian vote bank are compelled to nominate Christians as office bearers at state and district levels.

Start new Tamil extremist parties and create more and more Tamil chauvinist outfits to make shrill noises for Tamil People/Tamil Nation, for the LTTE, against the Sri Lankan government, against the central government, even against judges of the High Court and Supreme Court, for human rights, against law-enforcing agencies like police and army; in effect create enough noise and generate enough heat to provoke uncooperative and weak governments to either use force or hopefully to surrender to extremist demands.

The ploy has succeeded just as every Church ploy has succeeded because the Church always preys upon vulnerability, ambition, hubris and greed. The state government-central government partnership had yielded phenomenal results for the Christian state of Tamil Eelam but that had ended with Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. Temptations of sharing power in New Delhi had weakened even the verbal call and support for Eelam. The Church’s next move was to weaken the two largest Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu by making them dependant upon smaller parties for survival.

The Church was the only force which saw the advantages of weakening national, nationalist and large regional parties. Tamil Nadu politics had been centered around only two poles for close to half a century. A strong DMK and AIADMK were assets to both the Congress and the BJP not only in state elections but also in national elections. The Church saw how regional parties with no support outside of their states could still influence national policies and it applied the rule with great foresight in Tamil Nadu.

As government support for the LTTE ended and the vehicle was destroyed in Sri Lanka, the Church had to keep the idea of Tamil People/Tamil Nation alive in Tamil Nadu. Even as the Church donated liberally to both the DMK and AIADMK, making them both look like subservient agents of the Church, the Church punished them both by eating into their varied constituencies through the innumerable splinter parties which mushroomed to coincide with waning government support and interest in Tamil Eelam.

The two largest Dravidian parties were themselves made vulnerable to intra-state coalition politics which diminished their value and leverage in New Delhi. Neither the Congress nor the BJP were strong enough to accommodate the baggage which now came along with the DMK and the AIADMK in the form of their state coalition partners.

The Congress and the BJP would now be subject to pressures not only from Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa but also from Vaiko, Thol Thirumavalavan and Ramdoss; not to speak of the good reverend Father Jegath Gaspar Raj, the Tamil Nadu Muslim Munnetra Kazhagam and the Indian Christian Front. Muslims and Christians not only form political parties which are overtly Christian and Muslim but also spread themselves tactically in all important political parties for leverage.

The DMK and AIADMK must both realize that only when Tamil Nadu’s non-Brahmin communities, when coastal villages and communities remain Hindu, their own electoral constituencies will remain with them. If they allow Christian donation to their parties to pressure their policies, if they allow foreign money to continue to come on the scale it is now coming into Tamil Nadu, inevitably, inexorably, they will be weakened because the first rule in any business is that all investments must yield profit.

The Church is not going to invest money into their parties and the state only to have Karunanidhi and family, Jayalalithaa and baggage to enjoy the fruits of power. The Church wants the whole of Tamil Nadu and a large part of Sri Lanka. If the DMK, AIADMK and the BJP do not see this even now, it may well spell their doom. The Congress in Tamil Nadu is recruiting Christians into the party at all levels – educated, poorly educated, as leaders and as cadre.

If because of the DMK and AIADMK have already been weakened and if because the BJP in Tamil Nadu is still clueless about what is happening in the state, the Congress resurrects itself, it will resurrect as a Christian party whose Christian content will not be immediately seen or felt. It will either wear an encultured face like it wears now in Delhi and wore in Andhtra Pradesh under Y Samuel Rajasekhar Reddy or it may even opt for a temporary idiot Hindu face.

Sri Lanka’s Tamil Hindus can be protected and Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu protected from the predatory Church only if India’s polity, Tamil Nadu’s polity and the Buddhist clergy in Sri Lanka wake up to the Church’s agenda for India, Sri Lanka and Asia.

Radha Rajan

30th March, 2011.

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[i] The writer has used the word Church generically to mean not only churches of all denominations, including Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, Lutheran, Adventist, Pentecostal and New Life, New Mission but also Christian NGOs, Christian funding agencies, White Christian governments and countries which legitimize and use evangelization and militant Christian missionary objectives as instruments of foreign policy in countries of Asia, especially India, China, Thailand, Myanmar and Indonesia; the generic Church also includes the United Nations with a charter that enforces Christian ‘liberal’ political principles as the universal socio-political ideal which will be enforced coercively by any one of the arms of the generic Church, including military intervention.

[ii] Indian Tamil people are indentured labour from the erstwhile Madras presidency forcibly transported to Sri Lanka to work in British owned tea-estates.

[iii] South of Cuddalore every fishing hamlet along Tamil Nadu’s vast coastline is almost 100% Christian. The Church wants fisher-folk to be given the status of Scheduled Tribes where even Christian converts are eligible for reservation quota; and that is why the Church is not asking for Scheduled Caste status. The Church is playing a covert role in getting Tamil Nadu’s fishermen to regularly intrude into Sri Lankan waters, not only to pressure the state government and New Delhi to confront the Sri Lankan government, but also to provoke the Sri Lankan government into using force to deal with trespassing fishermen. The idea is to vitiate Tamil Nadu/India-Sri Lanka relations.